"In the process, SciAm played a small but important role in the self-immolation of scientific authority—a terrible event whose fallout we'll be living with for a long time."
Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.
Which is it - small or important? All that seems like a bit much.
Was the nail small or important?
I don’t understand the point or reference being made.
However there are plenty of real life examples of a single small detail causing outsize impact. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Airlines_Flight_261
It's kind of absurd to think otherwise.
You want to ask whether the system needs to be tracking nail quality if the kingdom relies on nails that much. You also want to be asking why critical information is being sent by only one messenger.
It’s an older way of writing English. But not like super old. Basically the kingdom was lost because of 1 missing nail.
Proverbs are often contrived (e.g., "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones" - who lives in a glass house?).
One nail is small and unimportant but the general problem of getting enough nails is a big important one.
And anyway, the messenger also could have been shot, the horse could also have tripped on a rock, the battle could have been lost even with the message getting through. If their plan hinges on everything going right, the kingdom has put themselves in a position where they don’t have any small problems, just big ones.
The root cause of the messenger failing was the missing nail. Sure it could have been many other things, but in this case it was the nail. And if it was a pitched battle that was narrowly lost by one message, sure, they could have won or lost because of a dozen other factors, but in this case it was the missing message. There are likely many other important things to worry about, but in the system as it is today, it failed for want of a nail.
Plenty of large engineering outages were because of single keystroke typos. Should these systems be less prone to human error? Of course. Are they? Some of them are, but right now some of them aren't.
The point being made is that small things can be important if other things go wrong. We should fix the other things, but often they are much harder to fix than the small thing. And really, we should care about both, since humans are capable of that.
Maybe it's like cheese because culture goes bad the way cheese goes bad?
Sometimes the problem really is tiny. Ill look for the link, but I read an article about how Valve, the company, was saved by an intern.
I think details matter.
For me, this is the moral of horseshoe nail story. It's something I preach to my team - details matter. I’ll add that unfortunately we often don’t know which details will matter ahead of time.
In fact, lynchpins are so small and important that the term is used when there's something that is small but so important that missing it would ruin a project, because the lynchpin ties it all together into a cohesive whole.
Also the replies to my sibling have me confused if i am even awake... who hasn't heard "for want of a nail"?