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Comment by BlargMcLarg | Hacker News Reader

People, as a collective, fail to learn from research or history and like to use their authority and charisma as a stand-in for logic and proof.

It isn't just the managers doing this. Anyone who isn't in a position of authority but has knowledge of the state-of-the-art, research on it, etc. can tell when someone in that position is pushing their ideals over actually having done research or doing logic beyond a bunch of unquantifiable 'what if' arguments. It takes 5 minutes of online research to dismantle their arguments. But it still happens regardless, even in CS and SD where myths are pushed as absolute truths.

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> where myths are pushed as absolute truths.

My favorite myth is the one that I hear surprisingly often, from educated and intelligent people. I hear it, because I ask them why they bias for only young people; even in senior management, architectural, and mentoring roles.

They explain that young folks can do the impossible, because they haven't been told that it's impossible. It's a really compelling myth, reinforced by founders of successful unicorns, sharing it as their "secret sauce," as opposed to obsessive work, intelligence, and an enormous dollop of good luck and timing.

I call it the "Don't Look Down" Fallacy.

When Wile E. Coyote runs off the edge of a cliff, he stays up, until he looks down.

If you don't allow anyone into the team that yells "Look down!", then you can fly.

Eh, I think you’re reading into it too much. The reality is that organizations accrue a set of both tested and untested beliefs. A lot of untested beliefs (i.e. someone told me X will turn out badly so I will just avoid doing X) are useful heuristics to avoid relearning expensive lessons, but some untested beliefs are just wrong. Circumstances have changed or they were never right in the first place and need to be tested again. New people (and especially young people, but not necessarily) are good at doing that — sometimes deliberately and sometimes by accident.

> but some untested beliefs are just wrong.

Absolutely. I didn't mention people that tell you to stay away from the edge.

In many cases, timidity (often a reaction to past trauma) can be debilitating.

I remember when I was interviewing at startups, and Every. Single. One. -Every one, described themselves as "unicorns."

The harsh reality is that, for every unicorn, prancing around the tech industry, there's a charnel pit, filled with the corpses of 10,000 goats and jackasses, with horns glued to their foreheads.

Not all timidity is bad, and, sometimes, ignoring warnings can be quite fatal.

Most corporate hierarchies exist to create status and power, not to enhance effectiveness and productivity.

"My team always give 110%" is better than "I treat my people like adults with lives of their own", even if it gets much poorer results.

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