思考与写作azarask.in
你解决错了问题
You're solving the wrong problem
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导读
文章借 Paul MacCready 研制 Gossamer Condor 人力飞机的故事说明：看似在攻克“造人力飞机”这个目标，真正要解决的是如何建立一套能快速试错、快速迭代的工具与流程。作者由此提出，面对难题时先退一步审视问题定义和解决路径，往往比直接硬解更有效。
为什么经久不衰：它提供的是一种跨领域的元方法——先重定义问题、先造出能加速迭代的工具——所以十几年后仍被反复讨论；评论区对标题是否误导的争论也让文章更有嚼头。
HN 评论精选
质疑文章论点：问题是工具不足而非问题选错；“更快迭代”虽好，不代表都要重定义问题。
我认为这并不正确：人们当时解决的是正确的问题，只是工具不足。MacCready 的方案是改进工具，但其他替代方案（比如雇一千名工程师、一年造一千架飞机）也可能找到同样答案。当然成本高得多，对这个题目不经济，但在很多领域 MacCready 的做法未必最优。“更快迭代”是好经验，可能适用所有人，但想解旁支问题的诱惑很难抵抗，而且常常没必要。
hythloday查看英文原文
"The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges." I think this is untrue: people were solving the right problem, but doing so with insufficient tools. MacCready's solution was to improve the tools, but other alternatives (for example, hiring a thousand engineers and building a thousand planes a year) would have found the same answer. Of course that answer would have come at a much higher cost and for this problem it would have been uneconomical, but there are plenty of domains where MacCready's approach would have been suboptimal. "Iterate faster" is a good lesson that I think is probably applicable for all of us, but the temptation to solve tangential problems is a hard one to resist and often unnecessary.
把 MacCready 的贡献解释为寻找新的设计方法论/元问题，而非直接造飞机。
每个提案都应先陈述问题，这几乎是公理。MacCready 的洞见是：如果知道怎么造这种飞行器，造人力飞机就“容易”；所以挑战其实是寻找新的飞机设计方法论来探索设计空间，这个“元问题”的解法与“造一架能这样的飞机”完全不同。对创业者的启发是：当有人认为以低成本、可变现方式解决 x “不可能”时，真正要寻找的是比常规方法更高效的新解法。太元了，抱歉。
ChuckMcM查看英文原文
Its axiomatic that every proposal should start with a statement of the problem. MacCready's insight was that building a human-powered aircraft was 'easy' if you knew how to build such a craft. (And in fact today you can take his work and build your own Gossamer creation) So the challenge was this was a search for a new airplane design methodology to explore the airplane design space, and that this 'meta' problem had a much different form of solution than the stated problem of 'build an airplane that does this.' The applicable insight for entrepreneurs is that if someone thinks solving problem 'x' in a cost effective (i.e. monetizable way) is "impossible", then the search is for new and different ways to solve 'x' which are more efficient than the well known ways. Too meta I know, sorry.
标题误导：文章真正讲的是快速迭代工具，不是“解错问题”。
在我看来标题很有误导性。结论是：要解决问题，你需要一个能让你快速迭代的工具。作者说我们没意识到需要这样的工具……
tintin查看英文原文
In my eyes a very misleading title. The conclusion is: to solve a problem you need a tool with which you can iterate fast. The author states that we don't understand we need such tool...
在 3D/游戏开发中，先投资好的调试输出/可视化，才能快速迭代。
我在开发游戏和其他 3D 应用时学到过类似但稍有不同的教训：确保调试输出足够好，以至于你在打开调试器之前就已经知道大概发生了什么。简单如始终在屏幕上打印 2D/3D 光标位置；用一行代码就能添加可见的调试线和多边形（之后只注释掉而不是删除，因为还会再用）。开发 A* 之类算法时，确保能轻松把每个值打印到屏幕上。添加这些简易调试输出通常一遍又一遍地值得，但项目往往要等人们在算法上卡太久之后才加。所以 3D 开发中的正确问题：先做调试输出。
coffeeaddicted查看英文原文
Slightly similar lesson I learned when developing games (and other 3d apps). Make sure your debug-output is so good that you don't have to start the debugger before you already have an idea what's going on. Simple stuff like - your 2d and 3d cursor positions can be printed on screen always. You can add lines and polygons which are visible for debugging in your code with a single line (and you only comment them out afterward and don't remove them as you will need them again). When developing things like A* - make sure you can print every value on screen easily. Adding all those kind of easy debug-outputs is usually worth it over and over again and still it often only gets added to a project after people get stuck on the algorithms for too long. So right problem in 3D-development: debug output first.
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