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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

Better formulated as: some weaknesses may be unintended consequences of your strengths under certain conditions. Rules of thumb like this are useful approximations of reality, but I wouldn't elevate them to the level of a principle that I would use in 1:1s. All the little phenomena that people like the author (myself included) in the tech/management world have observed and written about, would probably add up to several thousand. Human behaviour is complex. Sometimes you have no choice but to handle it on a case by case basis.

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This isn't like most of the trite management tidbits you're comparing it to. All they're really observing is that there are no such things as "strengths" and "weaknesses" in the absence of context—there are only traits, and those traits may be useful, neutral, or counterproductive depending on the situation.

This principle shouldn't really be controversial because it's basically a law of nature. It's why small mammals took over from large reptiles after the asteroid hit. It's why New Zealand's flightless birds thrived until the introduction of the cat. Enormous size and cold bloodedness were an advantage until the climate changed. There was no need to waste energy on wings when there was no predator to eat you. Nature doesn't have a concept of strengths and weaknesses, nature has a concept of fittedness for a given environment, and we see the same thing with individual humans.

This is off-topic but I just wanted to say I appreciate your presence on HN. I see your name pop up often, and your comments are always insightful and clear. You consistently identify the root of complex topics (and disagreements/misapprehensions surrounding them) and are able to distill them in a non-argumentative way. Thanks for helping make this site a nicer place.

Thanks for saying so!

This was the push back on parent comment that I was hoping to find, against the misguided qualifier. Thanks. Strongly agree.

All weaknesses are strengths in the right context. Yea, perhaps the context simply doesn't exist in the world we maintain, but we can unreservedly acknowledge it's definitely in the "latent space of culture" :)

All they're really observing is that there are no such things as "strengths" and "weaknesses"

I don't think that's totally accurate, the article is very clear about the "duality" and "two sides of the same coin" concept. "No such things" dilutes it to something that may be a law of nature but that also approaches a tautology.

I agree with some of the comments picking the original post apart a bit, that the reality is more nuanced. "Coding speed" and "occasionally overlooking details" don't seem so cut-and-dried to me as two sides of a duality. Coding speed is the sum of a number of factors, one of which can definitely be just straight up being able to reason about things and get to a solution faster. Occasionally overlooking details is a symptom of rushing, which does relate to coding speed, but to me does not serve as a great example of the "strength = weakness" duality.

I also don't know if major evolutionary shifts over millenia are a totally apt metaphor for iterated situations involving the same individual human psyche. I feel like you zoomed out and generalized a bit much, which made it less controversial.

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