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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> Critical path/flow diagrams [0] are incredibly useful for both laying out what has to happen in serial vs what can be parallelized. That being said, I've almost NEVER seen them used...

Making technically good decisions is one of a distressing number of domains where making any attempt at all will put someone a long way ahead of the game vs most people who wield power. Several advanced techniques that nearly nobody seems to do:

"Do we have evidence that this is a good idea?"

"What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]

"Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?"

[0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.

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> [0] Please someone get this one into the mainstream US debate next time they're trying to start a war.

Speaking as someone with 20 years in uniform and as a War College grad (if only by correspondence) . . . the military ironically has this wired more than any other institution in the Federal government. The reason the military gets drawn into so much of US foreign policy is not because of a fetish for blowing things up. It's because it's the only institution where formalized planning is a thing, the only one where feats of large-scale logistics are par for the course, and the only one where "I'm not going there because I might get hurt" isn't a valid excuse.

As an example, one of the best ways for distributing aid after a natural disaster is an amphibious task force, because you can send the same Marines in to distribute aid that you would to take territory. And going into relatively unprepared areas and setting up infrastructure for follow-on forces is basically their bit either way.

The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like what's currently happening in Ukraine. And when you involve all the other agencies plus scads of glory-seeking politicians, it's hard to keep things from becoming a shitshow.

Military force, as demonstrated by the US and its allies, worked out really well in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan (Taliban 2.0 after 20 years), Syria.

Declaring victory and running way is the common theme of US foreign policy.

> outside of something like what's currently happening in Ukraine.

Typical slippery slope. "The problem comes in because military force is never the complete solution in and of itself outside of something like <insert any use of army>"

Even just the military won't solve the Ukraine. Like lets say superman comes down and lasers all the Russians.

Who gets what land? What happens to the people whose houses are destroyed? What happens to those whose farms are litered with landmines?

This is the posters point. The military can execute on a lot of things effectively but in order to go from 80% to 100% you need more than just them.

We have answers to all these questions, or can find them, but they can't be implemented in an active warzone.

Right, the military quells the warzone, and you still need a plan for after that. That's the 80-100% part, coming from people outside the military.

Point of order . . . "the Ukraine" is what Putin and his ilk call it. Ukraine is the name of the country. Its etymology does come from the Slavic word for "march" or "borderland," but that's the point. Ukraine is its own sovereign nation since 1991. Calling it "the Ukraine" or "the borderlands" subtly legitimizes the Russian claim that it's nothing more than "Novorossiya" or "New Russia."

The Ukraine literally means The Borderlands and refers to the areas fought over repeatedly by all various European countries from Sweden to Poland to Austria to Hungary.

Novorossiya is the name for the southern mainland of The Ukraine. The name dates back to the late 18th century, there’s nothing really “new” about it. Do you consider the name America to be old? Novorossiya is as old.

I suggest you find out how these lands were merged into The Ukraine during the Soviet era.

Seems pretty simple unless you are secretly stanning for the orcs. Ownership of the land should revert to the status quo ante before Putin's initial incursion into Crimea. Those whose property has been destroyed or mined should be compensated with seized Russian assets. Kidnapped Ukrainian children should be returned to what's left of their families.

What alternatives would be more fair, from your perspective?

I read this as a logistical question rather than a moral one. What happens when two farmers can't agree on where their property boundaries sat prior to the war, the fences got ripped out after one side used the area as a staging ground, and any records have been blown up by glide bombs? What happens to the real, physical land that's covered in mines and needs to be either cleared or fenced? Where can Maria and her family stay tonight, next week, and where will they end up? These aren't (necessarily) problems for the military to solve.

Good points all. Like the other poster said, though, first the war must end. It's to our shame (meaning the West's) that Ukraine isn't well into the suing-Russia-for-reparations phase.

> What alternatives would be more fair, from your perspective?

It would be more fair for the Americans to first return to Europe and only then voice their valuable opinions about fairness.

Whatabout

What about taking arguments of this quality back to Reddit, where they belong?

> Those whose property has been destroyed or mined should be compensated with seized Russian assets.

Unless you think the resources of the clearly guilty are limitless, this sounds like Versailles-type collective punishment that may be satisfying, and maybe even moral, but is counter-productive long-term.

Putin is no Hitler, though. I suspect that turning Russia into a failed state that the rest of the world will have to support is exactly his plan. He looks at Kim Jong Un with envy, not contempt.

Orcs? How polite.

What do you call African Americans and Asians? Just curious.

Depends. What country did they illegally and unjustly invade, and what war crimes did they commit in the process?

By that logic you need to take a good hard look at your own history.

Damn straight. Orc-nature is a consequence of one's actions, and we have no shortage of it ourselves.

That being said, we're not the orcs this time, so your point is tangential at best.

You’re masking your racism and Russophobia with evasion.

Da, tovarisch

What no vatnik? Or is that reserved for Reddit?

I do love the smell of racism and hypocrisy in the morning.

You're being downvoted because that's not a slippery slope argument familiar to the mostly US-based readership and it's hard to tell if you're crazy or not.

Ie, the US identifies very strongly with three wars (revolutionary, civil, and ww2) where military force was a necessary but not sufficient condition. Ie, the US lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan despite having a far more favorable balance of military forces because they could never find a political solution. If you were taught that wars are won by force alone, you were miseducated.

99% of all leadership is making a decision and then asking for data to support that decision unfortunately.

Like when my company's bosses decided:

- (pre-Covid) No working from home, face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

- (during Covid) We are doing a great job WFH. Our productivity did not decline.

- (after Covid) Return to the office. Face-to-face time is essential for innovation and collaboration.

And always supported with "data".

COVID wfh was a weird time. The company I worked for was remote before COVID. Oddly, COVID was a boost to basically every metric, including the ones not tracked for productivity like even number of Slack messages sent or raw number of PRs. I think everyone was just closed off from their out of house obligations, especially families with kids who went to a lot of activities that got cancelled. So they worked instead or were just more rested and less exhausted from everything else in their lives.

The problems started mostly with cohorts hired remote during COVD. Something about COVID wfh attracted a lot of remote candidates with not so great intent: The overemployed people getting multiple jobs, the side hustle bros who needed a paycheck and healthcare while they worked on their startup idea, the 4 Hour Workweek people who tried to travel the world and answer Slack once a day or other people who generally just weren’t interested in actually doing work while remote. It started to add up over time. There were also the people who cancelled daycare and tried to watch kids while they worked, people who were never at their keyboard for some reason, a guy who was always catching COVID or going to a funeral whenever you needed to schedule a meeting. It really wore everyone down. I wished we could have stuck with the pre-COVID remote crew because for some reason everything changed when everyone started WFH.

not to mention normal folks not used to wfh, who were used to spending half their day chatting between cubes or getting coffee. i worked in a very strange office, the coding team of a regional grocery store that maintained our in-house COBOL applications. most of those folks had worked there for 20-30+ years, so it was a huge departure from anything they had ever known.

Those are not contradictory.

Edit: changed question mark to period to clarify.

I think the point was that they are contradictory, yet "data" was shown to indicate they were each sound decisions, implying an inherent dishonesty and willingness to bend data to support an already drawn conclusion.

No, I'm stating that those aren't contradictory. Perhaps they were inaccurate paraphrases of statements that were contradictory, I have no idea. But taking what's written at face value, they are not hard to reconcile. E.g., being productive doesn't necessarily imply innovating.

Not hard to reconcile _if you try in good faith to do so, with the necessary faculties, interest, time, and access_.

This caveat pretty much defines reality.

I... don't really follow.

This is also - disturbingly - how the human brain operates.

1. Some subconscious process makes a cynical decision about what course of action is most beneficial for you.

2. Another part, known as the "Press Secretary" comes up with a good sounding motivation for why this is the morally right thing to do.

3. You now genuinely believe you're doing the right thing, and can execute your cynical plan, full of righteous zeal!

I'm as autism-brained as anyone, and would probably prefer brutal honesty in all communications, but I also think you have to accept that well functioning human organizations don't operate like that, and if you want to be part of such organizations it's best for everyone to accept how they work.

This is not entirely true. Daniel Kahneman wrote about it if you want a source. Humans generally have two ways of thinking: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 is fast, heuristic-based, and not always accurate. Arguably, that's why things like racism and bigotry take hold. Type 2 is slow, analytical, and what lets us do things like send men to the Moon or write large software applications.

The trouble is that you have to consciously shift to Type 2 thinking, it takes longer, and it's tiring. Dave Snowden of Cynefin fame has a great bit (paraphrasing here) about the purely Type 2 thinker in ancient days on the African savannah getting eaten by a lion. Because he or she sits there doing a complex analysis of "OK, felid, yellow fur, moving towards me, etc. etc." while the Type 1 thinker goes "Oh shit! Lion!" and runs away.

Type 1 thinking has a role. You just have to be mindful about when you're misusing it.

What I describe is a summary of the book "The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life".

My take is that it's worse than you think, and Type 2 thinking is often used to justify or rationalize actions driven by Type 1 motives.

Link: https://amzn.to/3KqLzF7

I’ll settle for making decisions. Most leaders can’t even do that

I’ve literally never seen that happen. It’s always problem, initial hypothesis, request for data (then data is either unavailable or typically supports the hypothesis, occasionally the data doesn't and you go back to the drawing board.

Have you worked on a data team? I've seen that bs a number of times, it's how I mentally grade different managers and PM/POs.

Re the unavailable data: Smart people ask before a big change, get told what devs are missing and need to instrument/record and then leverage those new metrics for the before/after comparison. Not-smart people yolo the changes, ask for the metrics after and go whoops it's too hard or impossible to check.

I’m sure it does happen but a number of times does not come close to all (99%)

"If you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess to anything"

"Assuming we just keep doing what we're doing, where will we be in 12 months?"

I find this one interesting, a business youtuber I follow said he finally realized that his teams all got ~5% better every year if he just left them alone and changed nothing. He said he used to have all these ideas he wanted to implement, but that if they didn’t have a lot of potential upside, they weren’t worth the short term drops associated with reimplementing, retraining and the teams having to relearn and explore their new problem space.

> What if we assume that we achieve the most likely outcome of this action, based on past experience and checking what happened when other people tried doing it? Is it a good idea?" [0]

I’ve tried exactly this and it was shocking to me that even when faced with examples of themselves failing to do something, people would just willingly go on the record with this:

Lindsay: Well, did it work for [us last time]? Tobias: No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but ... But it might work [this time].

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