Don't Feed the Thought Leaders
I enjoyed that read. I suspect that it probably pissed off a few folks.<p>I&#x27;m a grizzled, scarred old codger that spent most of his career, saying &quot;Are you <i>sure</i> that&#x27;s a good idea?&quot;, only to be ignored, and then put in charge of mopping up the blood.<p>I have learned that &quot;I told you so.&quot; is absolutely, 1000% worthless. It doesn&#x27;t even feel good, saying it.<p>What I have learned, is that, when I see someone dancing along a cliff edge, I quietly start figuring out where the mops are kept. If that person has any authority at all, I&#x27;ll never be able to stop them from their calisthenics.<p>One of my favorite quotes is one that pretty much describes &quot;hedgehogs&quot;:<p><pre><code>    &quot;There&#x27;s always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong.&quot;
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There&#x27;s another one, by the same chap (H. L. Mencken):<p><pre><code>    &quot;The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours is a fake.&quot;
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Of course, the issue is that for every 10,000 appalling, messy, featured-on-rotten-dot-com failures, there&#x27;s one spectacular success. Since humans are biased to think of successful outcomes as more likely than they actually are, the ingredients for that success become a &quot;recipe,&quot; and are slavishly reproduced, without any critical thought, or flexibility.<p>It&#x27;s like a witch doctor&#x27;s formula for headache cure is bat urine, dandruff from the shrunken head of a fallen warrior chief, eye of newt, boiled alligator snot, and ground willow bark. The willow bark is what did it, but the dandruff thing is the most eye-catching ingredient, so it gets the credit, and everytime the chief gets a hangover, they start a war.<p>Somewhere down the road, a copycat substitutes hemlock for the willow bark, and headaches become a death sentence.