Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Many things that look like coordination problems are really optimization problems.

It’s common for huge government programs like the Space Shuttle, F-35, California High-Speed Rail etc to try and satisfy a widest range of different groups and therefore be N increasingly poor solution for any one group. In such cases the root problem isn’t finding the optimal solution to make everyone happy, the root problem is picking which groups get what they want and are willing to pay for it such that a project works well.

It could easily be the correct solution is to abandon a project early rather than waste a great deal of time and money either directly or by to upsetting some groups who will block the project. The same applies inside of organizations, though it’s less obvious from the outside.

View on HN

I really like the example gwern provided:

Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. - Stan Kelly-Bootle

The examples you listed above are what I would call 0.5 solutions. To me, these are straightforward co-ordination problems that failed to find a solution and then devolved into optimization problems that failed to find the right local minima because the problem formulation was flawed in the first place.

Co-ordination problems aren't fuzzy and nice almost all the time. A lot of solving co-ordination problems is getting two people to agree to knife the third to make the problem go away.

Your example disproves your point. Array index works just fine if C programs use 0 indexing and Pascal programs use 1 indexing. There’s zero need for compromise between different groups here and the overhead of trying to do so is often just wasted effort.

Coordination only applies within some group, so your example is showing coordination bias. By assuming everyone needs to agree to something you’re failing to optimize.

Pulling the plug doesn’t look good appealing when this project is your livelihood, but looking after stakeholder’s interests isn’t always the same thing as continuing to collect a paycheck. Thus at the root of such projects should be an optimization problem not a coordination one.

There's 3 seperate aircrafts in the F35 program which, if we designed any 2 of them, could have been coherent, well designed, well executed single aircrafts. It doesn't matter which 2, pick any 2 of the 3 missions and we could have gotten 2 great aircrafts.

But planners looked at the costs and said we simultaneously can't justify 3 seperate programs and also we can't simplify it down to one program, hence the ungainly mess that resulted.

Like I said before, if someone could have convinced any 2 of the branches of the military to knife the other one, we could have reached a much better place than we are now. That we didn't was a co-ordination problem.

I wouldn’t call the F-35 a mess, all 3 are solid aircraft and the F-35A was both cheaper than the F-22 and can be exported.

Rather than having the branches pick 2 of 3 the real question IMO is if making more F-22 instead of trying to include the F-35A would have simplified the F-35B and F-35C enough to be a net benefit. That isn’t about one side losing the fight, it’s a question of which approach results in all sides being better off.

However, from a military contractor standpoint the F-35 was a gravy train and ultimately any talk about efficiency means reducing profit. In that context things worked wonderfully for Lockheed Martin and it’s many suppliers and subcontractors.

The F-35A was fine, it was mostly the B that clusterfucked the project. Again, if we're talking about incentive problems, those are just straightforwardly co-ordination problems.

It’s complicated, the weight reduction redesign spurred by the B significantly improved the other 2 variants. So arguably the B was a major benefit to the project even if it drove up prices and added significant delays.

The only way to quantify if it was a success or is in comparison to having the B end up as a separate project. Which comes down to a cost benefit analysis, though we don’t actually know as much as that alternate because it didn’t happen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com