Recent searches
Search options
Administered by:
As a 58-year-old this quote from @pluralistic resonates.
“I’m 52 years old. I used to be way more interested in how things worked. Now I’m interested in how they fail.”
From: https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/06/fool-me-twice-we-dont-get-fooled-again/
@Andylongshaw @pluralistic I agree with the idea, but also as a kid, breaking stuff was a good way to figure out how something worked. All the different pen clickers, my self-built PC, and optical illusions to figure out where the brain fails and therefore how is works.
Sometimes failure is the only way to truly find out how something works.
(Thinking also of big business and anti-trust, where companies fail all the time until they're too big to care, at which point regulation fails)
@Andylongshaw @pluralistic
I am reminded of the saying that you need to learn the rules to be able to break them. In other words, you can only become interested meaningfully in how things break once you have some understanding of how they work.
@gueuledatmosphere @Andylongshaw @pluralistic But it also works the other way - seeing how things break can trigger meaningful interest in how they work.
Of course, this approach is not recommended when the risk of breaking something important is also not well understood, and if the goal is to modify a rule to be more effective, targeted, or efficient then this is a bad idea!
@robotistry @gueuledatmosphere @Andylongshaw @pluralistic
My take on rule-breaking and rule-changing tends to be:
1) Why does the rule exist?
2) Do I agree with that purpose?
2a) If not, why not? Why was that purpose chosen? What purpose would I agree with instead?
3) Does the rule actually fulfill that purpose?
3a) If not, how does it fail? What rule would actually fulfill the purpose?
...It feels like the take of the incoming administration and its allies is far less mature.
For me, your thought @gueuledatmosphere reflects a lot of my professional career. In the 25 years of being more reflective I’ve learned a lot about how things work and then learned more as those things failed for various reasons when I applied them.
Your thought @robotistry reflects more of how I’ve learned about wider society. In many cases I’ve only dug into things because they are failing (example: UK constitutional law because of Brexit)
/cc @pluralistic
@Andylongshaw@mastodon.me.uk @pluralistic@mamot.fr
I've always found failure-modes – and working around them – far more interesting. Though, it does get tiring, at times, and I appreciate things that "just work" (especially when companies don't feel compelled to "move fast and break things": not everything needs "improved" and not every change is an "improvement" – fewer by the day, seemingly).
:) This is gold. :) Engineers and scientists learn far more about processes and materials, biology et al. when an experiment or an engineering work fails than if everything goes according to design. :)
And then we have Boeing :) which fails because of Capitalist extremism profits for a few trumping safety and trumping basic engineering.