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Comment by mcgwiz | Hacker News Reader

Illogical.

You think because the awful projects you worked on called themselves Agile, that Agile is bad? I hate to break it to you, but you are not special enough for your personal experiences to define "Agile" for the rest of the world.

I learned about Agile, Scrum, XP, Kanban, and project management in general through a self-motivated quest. I didn't accept what I read until it was corroborated. I sought the authoritative texts (original works) and the underlying principles of what I read.

Least of all did I take at face value the claims of the clearly incompetent that happened to be physically in my presence.

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so all of a sudden, it's my fault?

It's not about fault. It's about responsibility. It's your responsibility not to expect explanations of observed inconsistencies to be spoon-fed to you, and generally not to expect the process of learning, of improving your understanding of the world, to be necessarily simple, trivial, straightfoward, obvious, or efficient. Otherwise, one almost necessarily (and with great fustration) jumps to conclusions about everything. Occasionally, the assumed conclusion is correct; unfortunately, that reinforces an unrealistic, unsustainable, and unpredictable pattern of learning.

It's not about fault. It's about responsibility. It's your responsibility not to expect explanations of observed inconsistencies to be spoon-fed to you [...]

Let's put this part to test. I hereby claim that I can teach you how to transmute lead to gold by waving your hands. I'll teach you the exact movements. Then someone can hand you a chunk of lead, you'll wave your hands and observe the results of the process I taught you. It's your responsibility not to expect explanations of observed inconsistencies -- between gold and what you have in your hands -- to be spoon-fed to you.

If we really did the above exercise, your conclusion would be that my claim is false. We could go even further than that. I could claim circumstances were not right. I could accuse you on basing your conclusion on anecdotal information. But somehow I doubt I could convince you or anyone else that I'm not a charlatan.

Ah, but I can't produce "authoritative texts (original works)" that reasonably and convincingly explain "the underlying principles" of transmuting lead to gold through hand-waving, could I?

Okay, no problem, let's change the example to "getting laid through neuro-linguistic programming". There are people who believe in that pseudo-scientific bullshit even today, so long after it's been proven to be total crap.

Do you honestly think that you could apply your argument about "not expecting to be spoon-fed explanations of observed inconsistencies" to NLP without being laughed at? I'll assume you don't and ask you why the heck you tried to pull the same argument when it comes to "Agile"?

It seems to me there's some disconnect here, as I don't understand how your comment has bearing on mine.

My point was that, given experiences that do not align with prior knowledge, it's no one's responsibility but their own to understand the basis of that misalignment. They can take a shortcut and jump to a conclusion, or they can take a longer, costlier route and seek more information.

The first part of your comment supports me. I'm not sure what exactly about NLP (which I'd never heard of before your comment, and just skimmed on Wikipedia, so I might be missing the cultural context you are referring to) that I should apply the "argument" that one is responsible for his own learning, and that jumping to conclusions (as I characterize the OP to have done, by asserting that the 5 "Agile" projects he worked on must, for some reason, be representative of Agile) will leave you frustrated in the long-term.

I understand there is a social aspect to learning, and that we can all be victims of herd mentality. The question is do we interpret such a situation as one of abuse (where we look for fault), or as one of misunderstanding (where we look for deeper understanding).

> I hate to break it to you, but you are not special enough for your personal experiences to define "Agile" for the rest of the world.

I couldn't have put it better myself.

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