Overthinking
kerkour.com
kerkour.com
But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink.
I overthink everything all the time and there are still many things I miss and do wrong. I can't imagine trying to limit my thinking just for the sake of not overthinking.
I'm not necessarily concerned about this blog post, but I'm curious if our frequent warns against overthinking can be a net loss?
We do this all the time. We just don't use the word "underthink". "You didn't think this through." "It sounds like you haven't gotten to the details yet." "Are you sure that's how it works?" "You need to start thinking things through." "You have a brain. Use it." "Pull your head out your ass." I think all of those phrases are suggesting the same thing underthink would.
If you run into traffic and get hit by a car, the conversation is about that, not "under thinking" because the impact is painful and obvious.
However, it's more subtle for someone to notice that it takes you 30 minutes to cross the street because you're way too cautious, and the impact of that ("you could be doing a lot more with your life than standing here") is less obvious.
- Look before you leap. - Measure twice, cut once. - Stay silent and have people think you're a fool, open your mouth and confirm it.
I'm sure there are many more common idioms pointing towards the idea of "think before you act".
- Don't dive head first into water.
- Measure nine times, cut once.
And a random saying I just remembered: "Autumn has the eyes of a summer and the teeth of a wolf."
Edit:formatting
- being late (acting in "autumn") ...looks/feels similar to
- being on time (seizing the moment at the right point, in "summer")
...but has a nasty bite?
Very good point.
> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink.
I believe that it's largely a cultural thing.
For instance, in French companies, US Americans definitely have the reputation of underthinking things (which US employees feel is "being productive"). Reciprocally, in US companies, the French have a reputation for overthinking them (which French employees feel is "assessing risks").
One more reason for which balancing cultures (and backgrounds, etc) is actually really important for the future of a company: we all have different blind spots.
I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.
In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.
It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets
Article V of the French constitution:
> The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.
Given that the US constitution was greatly influenced by the French one, and given France's influence and substantial aid in helping to establish the USA as an independent country it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could believe this, unless they were completely unaware of both French and American history and culture.
I mean, probably not with those exact words, but isn't that essentially the feedback you would get for almost any mistake you make at work that was foreseeable but not foreseen? Or even things like a code review, where pretty much all comments are of the form "you might want to consider how this effects OtherSystemX," which is a more helpful way of saying "you might be failing to think about something you ought to think about."
If you're like me, this is probably because the time spent thinking wasn't necessarily productive. It wasn't spent thinking about the right things, or about the things in the right way, with the right understanding or knowledge, etc.
This is hard to overcome because at least in my case this occurs because of a lack of understanding of what I'm doing, or perhaps a worry that I won't execute on something as well as I believe I could. But in there lies a significant problem. My overthinking is motivated by 1) impressions and hypotheticals (could I actually execute better? And what if I don't need to understand the problem better? What if there is no attainable solution to the problem that's better enough to warrant researching it?) and 2) insecurities like fear of failure, fear of being wrong, of appearing incompetent.
I often overthink because I want to do the best job I can (good) but... I want to do it on my first try (bad). I end up with massively diminishing returns on the thinking I do because of the first point mentioned above. I'm pursuing something that is arguably imaginary, and if I make good progress it's often pure luck rather than a calculated, predictable step forward.
This is what makes it overthinking in my case. I'm wasting my energy and potential. I could act on what I know much sooner and be more productive, then revise my work with what I learn in the process or what I learn later. I should move forward with a better balance of confidence and critcal thinking, being sure to consider what I know carefully, how well I understand what I'm engaging in, but also knowing that I'm acceptably competent and that I'll learn more by doing.
Easy to say, harder to do. But I do believe I lose a lot of my potential to overthinking. It becomes more neurotic than effective after a point. I'm often unaware that I'm even doing it; almost like I'm addicted to the process of analyzing, deconstructing, reconsidering, starting again. It feels somehow safer than taking the risk of making a (likely correctable) mistake!
I agree that underthinking, or I suppose an absence of thinking, should be more critically considered and addressed when it occurs. It's a much different beast though. I believe they occur for perhaps entirely different reasons.
- That was a stupid idea
- Do you even have a plan?
- Do you know what you’re doing?
- Darwin awards
- …
I think there is a lot of cultural concern about not thinking enough.
This guy in the article only thinks it's a problem because people are acutely aware of overthinking. They are completely unaware of under thinking.
There are simply too many topics in the world to think about so in order to make sense of the world at a macro level you under think almost everything.
I mean the guy is a software engineer OF COURSE he overthinks software related stuff. Guaranteed he's under thinking most of everything else.
It was not easy to express that A gave a quick response with a largely false content.
It is called rushing, it came from a culture of stopping well before decent quality, and it should not be a value.
Is the director the hero, who gave clear feedback to her employees then listened to the response and corrected the course?
Or is the director a lizard who demanded the impossible received junk in reply and didn’t recognize it even when courageously told?
It would be interesting to know how many times the outcome is "hero" and how many "lizard", under which conditions, in which contexts etc.
Of course you can assign the design tasks, but the rest of the tasks are depend on the outcome of it, so it doesn't work in practice.
Waterfall on the other side, does overly encourages overthinking.
Maybe you are just thinking? It only becomes overthinking when you have been at it for "too long". As in, it is not reasonable to guess that thinking more about it will be of value.
Of course, knowing when that is the case is hard. IMO we should spend more time figuring out when it is overthinking than warning people about overthinking.
When 99% of the world are under thinking, not thinking it through or worst and most likely the case, not thinking at all, then of course the 1% are overthinking.
There are downside to overthink on small things, procrastination.
"We need to think about it more" definitely exists. "We need to turn it into proper plan first" exists too.
Not thinking too much, but thinking too much on the wrong things that are not important.
You focus your time, money and effort on the wrong things.
Those are not the important things because you lack knowledge about reality, about the system as a whole.
But humans solved that problem long time ago. It is called "authority". If Michael Phelps tells me I am swimming wrong and wants to give me advice I listen. Idem If John Carmark tells me how to program.
The problem is that humans could be tricked: Michael Phelps could use his authority in swimming to sell microprocesors.
Noam Chomsky could use his authority in languages to sell you totalitarian political regimes that have failed over and over again.
Also the fact that someone knows something very well does not mean that he will tell you. People can deceive you because they profit from that.
Most con mans are experts on what they do. They know very well the Truth.
An intellectual can sell you a bad political regime because he personally expects to profit from that. A youtuber can sell you a product because she is an affiliate and earns a commission.
If you know how to compensate the biases, you can get very far reading the right books, and listening to the right people.
By ranking the relative importance of requirements you can at least try to optimize for the most important requirement, and be able to see that other ideas may be better for other requirements but not the most important one!
I think there is a time to just say “no” — even if we fear that others will accuse us of overthinking.
These expectations are often externally imposed either by industry or by our own experiences.
This dissonance is exacerbated by tools which require as much complex skills or lack the expected complexity in their output.
"Hello world" town reminds a hopelessly overpopulated slums detached from glitzy shine of a megapolis that one can experience but not truly become one.
I think Finance, Health and Social Media we can't really "under"think too much because at a certain point you have potential death in the health sector for making a mistake. You have the potential for a billion dollar lawsuit in the financial sector, and a major class action privacy lawsuit in the social media sector...
So while I tend to think, yeah this sounds great, at the same time we have to be very careful about what Jr level person that wants to start underthinking about stuff...
I think a good balance is to have old geezers overthink and young ones underthink and come to some middle.
It's all relative - one person can be thought of overthinking and the other person can be thought of as a 'cowboy' and just winging it
There right balance of action and caution is the thing that enables you to move forward quickly without blowing up.
It also "takes all kinds" on a team since different people have a knack for one or the other. The problem happens because most people fall in love with their preference and are blind to its downsides.
A quick tell is - whenever someone's justification for something blowing up is "oh but I have a bias for action" -- they are basically oblivious to their recklessness and underthinking. Whenever someone says "oh but I am much more cautious and thoughtful than these cowboys" they are oblivious to how little they do (vs could be doing) because they are paralyzed by overthinking.
The person I like to work with is the one who says "man, I have a bias for over/under thinking but I try to catch myself in situations where it's not appropriate"
What has consistently helped in winning trust when providing feedback is pairing any concern with either a qualification (blocker/aesthetic/security), a solution, or both. Then, you not only expose the thought process behind your perspective that they've missed something - with which your audience may not agree, but can judge in earnestness - but also your intention to help and support their vision.
It is one thing I got out of agile work. Sometimes people just do not know what they want. But they will know what they do not want. That can be a starting place for you to help figure out what they do want. Also many times something is way better than nothing.
Also if you are struggling with python vs C. Start with python. It is easy to splat something up and get something running and see results quickly. C used to be that thing. But it has a bit of a learning curve of 'how to compile a program' first, then learn to program with it. A good skill to have but when starting I would put it lower on the 'things to learn' scale.
That little program I did earlier I could have done in java/C/C++/C#/js/bash/powershell/winbatch/SQL/etc/etc/etc but I picked python as it got me to splat something and get it done. It aint pretty but it gets me the info I was after. 100% throwaway code. My only real nitpick with python is that its ruthless dogmatic approach to spacing. Some consider that a good thing. But at first when you are learning it can be a drawback as you do not understand grouping and scope yet.
Of course, context is everything.. so perhaps the blanket statement is a useful reminder for the author.. but also maybe dangerous advice for those reading who this just gives license to continue not putting enough thought into things they should.
A bias towards action might be a good default, but how many of us are dealing with untenable situations stemming from rushed decisions?
So be careful with this advice.. and do your best to know yourself and the situation.
I guess there is an art of thinking through things at a reasonable amount, knowing when to move forward, and when to stop again and think more.
Sure, learning this art surely has to be done to a large part by experience, so the points in the article has their merits, but things, people and circumstances are not always the same.
"Risk aversion" is the closest term I can find in common use. "Oh, this might be wrong!" or "Oh, someone might criticize me!" become risks you're unwilling to run. "If I give a talk about my idea, people might make fun of it!"
Everyone goes through this. Instead of thinking about it even more, Kerkour needs to work on his emotions. There's no shame in it. We're all afraid.
Is it sensible to think long and hard about the behaviour of a strategy which trades real money in real markets? Yes.
Is it sensible to spend a week (or any time at all really) deciding if you should use an alpine base image in your docker container or something else? No.
1: "The result? Projects never materialize or are months behind schedule, and everybody is frustrated."
Sounds exactly like Canada. The country with the highest post secondary education rates, so much good it does us.
"I overthink, therefore I am"
"Dubito, ergo super-cogito, ergo sum"
"I doubt, therefore I overthink, therefore I am"
paraphrasing René Descartes
No ego. No marketing. I don't even the Education section is part of it. The simple amusement one gets of solving a puzzle. And if the actual problem is boring and repetitive, why not spice it up?
Certainly a Poison, but none mentioned by OP.
But people selling framework X want to sell you the idea that if you just pick the right tool (theirs), you won't have those problems!
(This is somewhat circular, though: if you had said something like "I think about problems a lot because I want to avoid untangling incorrect messes" then that doesn't have to be overthinking. But once you hit analysis paralysis, building nothing for an extended period becomes itself an incorrect decision. There's a fine line between giving a problem due consideration and not being able to stop thinking about it.)
I got out of that frame by working with and watching other doers. I think real education happens when we see masters practicing their form, not when we symbolically learn about the form
It's worth being 'in the trenches' just watching, not having to do much, just observing how the nitty gritty tasks are done. Just like an internship: you mostly watch, not commit to complex tasks. Unless you are an intern & want to risk it and accidentally mess up the company's code. There are so many companies wrecked by interns' bad decisions, but luckily most of them bounce back from that with grace.