The Partial Control Fallacy | Hacker News Reader

The Partial Control Fallacy

pathsensitive.blogspot.com

77 pointsnancyhua18 comments

I mostly agree with this, but don't discount the idea of only improving by a couple percent. Most things (like grants) are stack ranked, and if everybody has between an 85% and 95%, a 10% improvement could put you at the top of the list.

There's a similar argument about athletics. Sure, the people who win gold medals and get MVP at the Super Bowl have amazing genetics, but they also worked crazy hard to get there. Your hard work isn't going to get you a gold medal, but if they didn't work for it, they wouldn't get it either.

The core message is good, though: if you don't have whole package, don't apply the polish. But if you think you have a shot, don't think you can skate by on what you already have.

> Applying that to the above, and you can see that, if I worked infinitely hard on my essays, I could only make my apps 11% better versus not doing anything at all. (At least to the extent that it really does follow that rubric [the essay being worth ten percentage points of 100], even if I submit a blank essay.)

This is wildly incorrect. Assuming you have a perfect score on every other part of the rubric, the maximum improvement you can get through the essay is 11% of your non-essay score. Without that assumption, the maximum improvement is positive infinity percent.

So? This text is aimed at people who care about the final 10%. People who score zero on every other part of the rubric aren't falling into the partial control fallacy.

This is such a useful concept! Surely someone gave it a name much earlier, right?

Edit: The closest thing that came to mind is the idiom "penny-wise and pound-foolish".

Parkinson's law of triviality (aka bikeshedding) could be considered a subset of this behaviour.

Bikeshedding is when a group of people form opinions about, and squabble over something frivolous and irrelevant, but appealing to the lowest common denominator.

Offer a group of people the opportunity to design a nuclear powered aircraft carrier, and no one says boo, but ask them which color is prettiest for a shed to park their bikes in, and suddenly everybody puts in their two cents, ad-nauseum.

Amdahl's law

Although they may give out a "rubric"; this is just a smokescreen. In most places, Grad School Fellowships are basically awarded based on 1) whose advisors are hotshots and 2) whose advisors are willing to play politics for them. Very little else matters, unless your essay is a steaming pile.

If you strongly desire a fellowship, I recommend researching which professors' students have gotten them in the past. Then, make sure you are on good terms with your PI, that the PI thinks you are a hard worker (whether or not you actually are), and write milquetoast essays that hit all the science buzzwords and PC stuff ("I'm interested in mentoring minorities"[0] - whether or not you actually do any of that).

[0] I actually did mentor minorities and didn't write about that in my essays, taking a more frank approach about what I thought was wrong with minority recruitment, and I lost out on a fellowship to a guy who now is a professor and has exactly zero nonwhite nonasians in his lab. Let's just say they don't really care about honesty and followthrough.

Incidentally, this student also had a research project where all of the data presented in the primary paper were artefacts of the preparation method (It didn't affect the overall conclusion). I confronted the student about this and even went through the process of repeating the experiment with a better prep, resulting in data that actually made sense. Some of the figures were completely invalid, and one of the subsidiary conclusions was wrong. I suggested that he issue a correction and at least stop talking about the subsidiary conclusion, but he continued to present it at several conferences afterwards, and as far as I can tell, the data have not been corrected in the literature. But he did get that fellowship. And now, is getting NIH grants. Your tax dollars at work.

It's a great point, too bad the author is focused on loserisms like winning competitive awards. Most ironic of all is applying for a Thiel fellowship because it's prestigious.

From "Competition is for losers" (http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-l...):

"Always prioritize the substance of what you're doing. Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games. They're endlessly dazzling, and they're always endlessly disappointing.” -Peter Thiel

> Don't get caught up in the status, the prestige games.

Easy to say if you're a billionaire.

An entrepreneur needs to create some unique value. That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others. Prestigious paths are very competitive, and they're competitive for precisely the reason that so many people are pursuing them. Thus competition is for losers.

Which is a better direction? Investing your energy in solving a problem where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?

> If you're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to create some unique value.

That's a way to succeed.

> That won't happen if you're following the same path as many others.

Yep, and that's why Valve and Epic shouldn't have bothered entering the FPS goldrush after Id and 3D Realms owned the market. :|

> Investing your energy in solving a problem for others where no good solution exists today? Or competing for a corner office?

How about doing what gets me paid? A lot of investors are seemingly more than happy to blow money on mundane rehashes of ideas in hopes of betting on the best rehash. There is no shame in being the not-quite-as-good rehash, if you get paid along the way.

Talking about "solving problems for others" is just a way of grandstanding pretending there's any more legitimacy to your narrowly-defined path of success as anything else. Lawyers and finance folks aren't solving anything new for others, and yet they're better compensated than any of us.

Jesus, stop buying this bullshit...it is how we (developers and entrepreneurs) are getting taken advantage of.

EDIT: Also, how is spying on consumers and modeling their data making the world a better place or solving a new problem, exactly? At least Transium was kinda new in the search tech space. :|

Equally easy to say if you don't have much at all. :D

And an easier position for most folks to get into, if they aren't already.

"The best college application is stellar grades and some good awards, the best resume is a great network and lots of success stories, and the best pitch to VCs is a rock-solid business."

...all of which are competitive awards.

I think this is called bikeshedding.

Bikeshedding is from Parkinson's law of triviality [1], which essentially says that deciding trivial issues takes a disproportionate amount of time - partly because there are many ways it could be done, and partly because non-trivial issues are hard to comprehend and are therefore easy to agree with.

This differs from the OP, where it is the ability to control an issue that is to blame - in Parkinson's law control is equal yet understanding is not.

Though of course the relation is strong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality

Not really that close. Bikeshedding is putting focus on something that doesn't matter, but is easy to argue about.

This is taking something that really does matter, but it's too late to change most of it, and putting too much effort into the remainder.

Amdahl's Law: if you toil and sweat to thoroughly optimize some step in a process that takes 10% of the time, so that it takes almost no time at all, you get only a 10% improvement out of it overall.

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