思考与写作johnsalvatier.org编辑精选
现实有着惊人的细节量
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
2018 — 2025,它一次次回到首页
黑点是上首页(≥ 50 分)的那次投稿,空心点是没冲上去的投稿,点越大分数越高。
导读
这篇 2017 年的博文指出,现实远比我们以为的充满细节:我们习惯用简化的心智模型看世界,直到真正动手做事(比如作者举的造楼梯例子)才发现处处是未曾预料的细节。文章提醒人们保持谦逊、主动去探究被忽略的细节,而不是想当然。
为什么经久不衰:它点破了一个永恒的认知陷阱——'知道'和'做到'之间的巨大鸿沟,无论做产品、写代码还是日常生活都适用,因此多年来反复被顶上首页。
HN 评论精选
搜索引擎让人误以为无所不知,而承认无知的能力才是做事的关键。
我注意到网络交流时代人们很少说'我不知道'。似乎人人都无所不知,搜一下就能掌握一切,还能找到一百个人支持你的任何立场。有本创业书说智力与创业成功是负相关:你越是因为聪明、什么都知道而获得奖励,就越难承认自己不懂的东西,创业越难成功。
DanielBMarkham查看英文原文
Something I've noticed now that we're all communicating online in written form: a lack of people saying "I don't know" It seems that everybody knows everything. Whatever the issue, a little bit of Googling and suddenly you know all there is to know. Even more wondrous, no matter what position you take on anything, some more search engine Kung Fu and you can find a hundred people willing to support you with arguments, surveys, facts -- whatever you need. Everybody knows everything. It's quite amazing. And then when you take a tech team into an unknown domain, suddenly they find it very difficult to open up, admit ignorance, and reason about things. I am reminded of some startup book or blog I read years ago. It was talking about the relationship between intelligence and startup success. The author said that there was a correlation. It was an inverse correlation. The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.
亲身创业经历证明:看似简单的生意里藏着无穷无尽的现实细节。
几年前我毫无实体产品经验就合伙创办了站立办公桌公司,本以为很简单。结果货运公司要大量信息,写字楼要特定格式的文件,每次都要电话预约送货,托盘进不了电梯需要人搬,还得有人处理托盘和包装垃圾,60 个箱子装好后还要安排人手和工具组装……电商公司硬是变成了服务生意,利润全没了。
sly010查看英文原文
A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be? Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal. To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc. Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)
忽视细节的'将就式'开发会让整个项目变成永远修不完的破房子。
这解释了为什么我很难和总说'我们直接这么干不就行了'的人共事。问题就出在'直接'上——他们太急于行动,不问细节也不请教有经验的人,用错误态度把楼梯装完,然后陷入无止境的修补:打磨、磨掉过长的螺丝、敲平翘起的木板,而根本问题永远修不了,因为大家都已经将就习惯了。
nlawalker查看英文原文
This is such a good explanation of why I have a hard time working with folks who always approach technical problems with the attitude of "why don't we just do this?" It's the just that gets me. They are too action-oriented to think about the details or ask someone who's done it before, so they start down the path of (to use the author's metaphor) buying cheap lumber and calculating the angles for cutting the stair boards. They follow through with that and finish the rest of the stairs with the same attitude. Now the stairs are finished and installed (shipped) - they look terrible, they're wobbly and too steep and everyone who walks on them in either direction trips. Then begins the never-ending process of in-place improvements: using a sander to even out the angles, grinding down the too-long screws that stick up, pounding on warped boards to straighten them out. We can't fix the angle or the poor spacing of the steps though, because everyone's gotten perversely used to it. When the whole house gets built this way, you live in a perpetual fixer-upper, where each component is either under revision or you've settled for it being "good enough" until enough work has been done to make everything else a little less broken.
自行车反打舵的例子说明:很多细节我们不是省略了,而是从未意识到。
作者提到自行车却错过了绝佳例子:问成年人自行车怎么转弯,他们会说'往转弯方向倾斜就行'。但高速摄像显示,转弯前总有一个毫秒级的反向打舵(countersteering),让车先瞬间失去平衡'倒向'弯道,再立刻修正。身体通过动觉反馈学会了它,大脑却从未明确意识到——我们不是有意简化现实,而是根本不知道这些细节的存在(默会知识)。
jasode查看英文原文
>Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? The author mentioned bicycles and inadvertently missed an opportunity to show another "unknown reality" that beautifully illustrates his point. Consider typical adults (not physicists) with 20+ years of bicycle riding. If you ask them, "how does a bicycle turn?", they'd respond that "you just lean into the direction of the turn and it turns." But that's not the complete picture of what actually happens.[1] If you were to capture the bicyclists with a high-speed camera, you'd notice that there's always a micro movement of countersteering to make the bike momentarily lose its balance and "fall into" the turn. Then there's an immediate correction of the steering to match the turn. This all happens in the span of milliseconds. Even though the human body "discovered" the countersteering by way of kinesthetic feedback, the bicyclists' brains don't explicitly communicate this intermediate step to others. (Tacit knowledge.[2]) It's not always the case that we "simplify" reality for innocent purposes of pedagogy. (E.g. we tell "lies" to children about "numbers", "functions", etc and as they get older, we successively remove the layers of lies as they get into high school and college math.) Instead, we often don't even know the reality (e.g. bicycle countersteering) to consciously omit it. That extra reality may not even be important. If one human is teaching another human, you can leave the "countersteering" detail out and it won't matter. The 200 years of people learning how to ride bicycles is evidence of that. However, if you're a robotics scientist and want to build a self-driven motorcycle, the reality of countersteering becomes a crucial detail. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llRkf1fnNDM [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
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