Foresight versus Negativity and Pessimism

When I worked remodeling and landscaping I used to try to visualize what could go wrong and head potential problems off while we were still planning the work. I finally got tired of the man I was working for calling me a pessimist and complaining about my negativity and quit saying anything.

Stay well away from anyone who uses the word "negativity". Every time I have heard it used it was an attack on someone attempting to show some foresight.

KISS: Keep It Simple and Succinct

Succinct means brief and concise, to the point. A succinct argument is one that more directly addresses the point under discussion.

The "traditional" meaning of KISS completely misses the point. The biggest problem KISS addresses is over-complication of plans - and it is not a problem of stupidity. Those most prone to over-complicate are the more intelligent, especially the highly intelligent and highly educated, but lacking in practical experience. Experience, especially wide experience, is the best prophylaxis for over-elaborate plans.

In large-scale planning, especially where the planner cannot see it through to completion or which has too many complications, it is easier to come up with excuses as to why it didn't work out than to actually figure out what caused any problems.
It is human nature to try to explain mistakes away - if you want to get better though you need to avoid situations that make it easy to do. Almost all government projects fall into this group, which is why many who tend towards libertarianism have practical experience and have dealt with the government enough to understand the way it actually works . (Former police, former military, and engineers, for example, tend to be over-represented among libertarians (in my reading and experience anyway, I haven't seen any really reliable statistics)).

Optimism - Dangers and Benefits

Optimism is not necessarily as beneficial as many proclaim.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist thinks it will change; the realist adjusts the sails.
-- William Arthur Ward

Optimists may accomplish more than realists, realists certainly accomplish more than pessimists, but optimists do many times as much damage. For example, nearly all "revolutionaries" and criminals are optimists. Lenin, Hitler, Sadam Hussein, Bernie Madoff, and probably all con-men and burglars were extremely optimistic. The conviction that they will never be caught is nearly universal among criminals. Many, perhaps most, excessive risk takers are optimists.

An unsuccessful optimist never learns. He is one of those fools who is sure everything will work out all right, but who does nothing to make sure it will. A successful optimist will learn from his mistakes and keep working at his problem.

Some work almost requires optimism, because the work is so tedious, for example, Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) says:

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I just found the last bug."

If you have a choice, you should plan for the worst and hope for the best, or as Lazarus Long put it "Pessimist by policy, optimist by temperament - it is possible to be both. How? By never taking an unnecessary chance and by minimizing risks you can't avoid. This permits you to play out the game happily, untroubled by the certainty of the outcome." (Robert A Heinlein, Time Enough for Love.) Take precautions then just enjoy yourself knowing you have done what you can to prepare.

Another view from David Weber and Eric Flint's novel, Crown of Slaves (Honor Harrington):

But if the expression "optimistic paranoiac" hadn't been a ridiculous oxymoron, it would have described Ruth fairly well. She seemed to take it for granted that half the human race was up to no good, even if the knowledge didn't particularly worry her much - because she was just as certain that she'd be able to deal with the sorry blighters if they tried to mess around with her.

From the unix fortune-cookie program:
pessimist: A man who spends all his time worrying about how he can keep the wolf from his door.
optimist: A man who refuses to see the wolf until it seizes the seat of his pants.
opportunist: A man who invites the wolf in and appears the next day in a fur coat.

The Value of Mistakes: Mistakes and Learning

Learning from your mistakes is the bedrock of learning. If you are learning something new you will make mistakes. Figure out why you made a particular mistake, and you will learn more from it than you would have if you had gotten the correct answer.

Don't fear to make mistakes. The harder your studies, the more mistakes you will probably make, because you are pushing the envelope harder, and learning more. If you are doing original research, mistakes are even more important. If you are doing original reseach and are not making mistakes, you are deluding yourself, either about not making mistakes or about the originality of your research.

You can learn more from mistakes - from things that go wrong - than from successes. Success can always be the result of accident or coincidence, things outside of your control. Sort of how it's easy to make money off the stock market when most stocks are going up or in an occasional year; but making money from stocks consistently (as a result of your knowledge and intent) is far harder and less common. Some people claim it is effectively impossible to beat the market index, that those with good long term results are mostly just luckier than others.

Since you are trying to succeed, however, a mistake is a definite sign that something in your knowledge of the situation or in your technique needs refinement or even to be completely re-thought.

Learning from others is less painful than learning from your own mistakes, so you should learn that way whenever you can, but if you don't learn from the mistakes you do make, the pain will be for nothing, and worse you may make the same mistake with same pain again.

"Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn from no other"
-- Benjamin Franklin.

This doesn't mean that learning from experience is the sign of a fool, rather that experience is the only way a fool learns. Everyone learns from experience.

"The study of history offers that opportunity [to learn from others experience] in the widest possible measure. It is universal experience - infinitely longer, wider, and more varied than any individual's experience." - B H Liddell Hart, Why Don't We Learn from History?.

The same is true of all of the sciences and engineering where the body of knowledge is accumulative.

"While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior."
-- Henry C Link

Don't fear mistakes, use them.

Getting Things Right by Avoiding Mistakes

I recently sold my copy of :

What Made Gertie Gallop? : Learning From Project Failures

by O. P. Kharbanda and Jeffrey K. Pinto

and wrote this review for Amazon when I did:

Useful and Readable, March 8, 2009

The projects reviewed here are old enough that they have been analyzed well enough for fairly complete understanding to be possible. The mega-scale of the projects makes them less than directly applicable for most readers, but their large scale makes for a completeness in their management, smaller projects frequently skimp on their formal management and are usually less well documented, that makes for a better analysis.

The techniques are well illustrated by the projects chosen and the writing does not get in the way of the analyses. This book is very clearly written, the individual project analyses can almost be read like short stories, but with the added benefit of being factual.

For those more interested more in a popular treatment of engineering failure than project management failure I recommend Henry Petroski's To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design. I mention this because when I bought this I thought this book was more on engineering failure than it was; a lucky mistake since it turned out to be more interesting and useful than I expected.


I think that reading about mistakes and errors is more useful to improving your own functioning than reading about positive techniques. As Marcus Ranum put it in "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security", "It is often easier to not do something dumb, than to do something smart."

The single best means of getting things right is to not do them wrong. Doing some reading in advance of starting a project is a good idea, but much more important is being careful while working - stopping when necessary to think things through or check reference works.

G Harry Stine in his The Hopeful Future wrote, "A self-taught person is usually deficient in one or more areas of his learning expertise."

Stine is a technocratic engineer, one of what Postrel calls a stasist in her book The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. Stine's book quoted above calls for planning the future, despite the inherent impossibility, and undesirability, of that task. Besides the general antagonism to his authoritarian, control-freak planning, I object to the quote above for more specific reasons. First, as phrased it is meaningless, what I think he meant is that a self-taught person may not be as "well-rounded" as he or some authority thinks they should be. Second, is why a self-taught person should care about someone else's judgement of them, unless that other is a potential employer, in first place. Third, if a self-taught person discovers he or she needs to know something that they missed earlier, they simply need to go find it out.

What Went Wrong?, Fourth Edition: Case Studies of Process Plant Disasters is a catalog of hundreds of things that have happened in chemical engineering plants. I own and have read an earlier edition not available from Amazon, but have examined this edition in a book store and it has even more case histories. Many of the case histories are widely applicable to many other situations.