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Comment by kmoser | Hacker News Reader

> The starting slope of the line in your carefulness graph has no slope. Which means you’re basically telling X that we can turn carefulness to 6 with no real change in delivery date.

This strikes me as a pedantic argument, since the graph was clearly drawn by hand and is meant to illustrate an upward curving line. Now, maybe there's essentially no clear difference between 5 and 5.1, but when you extrapolate out to where 6 would be (about 65 pixels to the right of 5, if I can be pedantic for a moment), there actually is a difference.

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This is a conversation about human behavior, not pixels.

A flat line will lead to bargaining, as I said. Don’t paint yourself into uncomfortable conversations.

If you don’t want the wolf in the barn don’t open the door.

Doesn't the flat line in this context mean that you're at a local minimum, which is where you want to stay? Where being less careful would take more time due to increased number of incidents.

If you can explain to me how you convince a nontechnical person why 6 is not free, I’ll concede the point.

But if not then my original thesis that this is needlessly asking for a pointless argument that costs social capital stands.

Curve higher at one hand and one finger more.

I think the pointless argument here is the one you make.

Mostly free is not the same thing as free, and the scale of ‘carefulness’ is already completely arbitrary. How much more careful is 6 than 5?

You don’t have to argue about it, because the scale doesn’t represent anything. The only thing to say is, sure, we’ll set the carefulness to 6.

I agree with both of you, but consider that if this was a real meeting, you’ve both just wasted 10-15 minutes arguing about a line on the graph of a metaphor. (and yes I’ve seen this behaviour in meetings).

I agree with the original comment, as professionals we can do better than simplified analogies (or at least we should strive to)

Good insight, thanks for that

> you’ve both just wasted 10-15 minutes arguing about a line on the graph of a metaphor

So goddamned many times. And multiply your 2-10 minute sidebar by the number of people in the room. You just spent over $200 on a wobble in a line.

Plus you’ve usually lost the plot by that point.

> If you can explain to me how you convince a nontechnical person why 6 is not free, I’ll concede the point.

"I said the minimum is at 5, but if you want me to trace the line more accurately then let's take a 2 minute break and I'll do that".

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