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Comment by OldHand2018 | Hacker News Reader

OldHand2018

Experienced people advocating against good changes is a bad thing. Experienced people advocating against bad changes is a good thing. Inexperienced people advocating for a good change is a good thing. Inexperienced people advocating for a bad change is a bad thing.

It's almost like it would be great if we knew what changes were good and what changes were bad before we started arguing about them. Any ideas???

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One good filter I’ve found is whether the person arguing has a good understanding of both the old thing and the new thing. If an experienced person doesn’t seem to understand the new thing, or an inexperienced person doesn’t seem to understand the old thing, then they probably aren’t making a good argument. Both of those certainly happen —- the inexperienced will follow fads and the experienced will not want to devalue their knowledge.

Also known as "Chesterton's Fence". Before you tear down a fence, understand why it was put there in the first place.

As my old boss used to say "qualify your advisors"

Ideas just have to be tried out. The problem is when a company have absolutely no process for letting developers, young or experienced, try out a new idea. Many companies have a very random "process", where a few select people can get away with just implementing their ideas, without any testing.

Small teams of 2-3 people spending a few days for testing out a new idea, or writing a prototype, may often work out.

You articulated this problem perfectly.

One of my central theses is 'Its almost impossible for people to determine what's true and equally as impossible to get them to admit it'.

Every single case you point out each actor thinks they are doing the right thing. Nobody knows what they are doing aside from one of those cases. The caveat being they have to fight against everyone else who believe they are also correct.

This all feeds into another central thesis 'the truth is at the very top of Maslow's hierarchy of "nice to haves"'

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