House of Eratosthenes

“Women don’t want to hear what you think,” goes the quote by Bill Cosby. “Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.” I’ve found through some painful professional experiences that it isn’t just women who have this problem, and from this I’ve learned I have to be very careful about where I work. “It works, but it isn’t the solution I envisioned when I posed the problem” is a complaint I’ve found I tend to arouse more often than other engineers. Maybe that means I’m really bad at my job. Then again, I notice I arouse this when it really does work…and the problem is one that’s gone unsolved, after others already took a crack at it. That’s not to say I’m exceptionally clever compared to my colleagues, in fact there’s days where I have to wonder. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong; I’m wrong a lot more often than I’m right. Arguing with liberals on the Internet, I’ve noticed over the years, one thing shuts ’em up quicker than anything else: “I likely make ten or more mistakes every day, before you even think about getting out of bed.” They don’t know what to do with it. They belong to the world of winning-arguments, and if you want to win arguments you’re supposed to avoid ever having made a mistake about anything. You’re supposed to play the game of “I must be infinitely wise and know everything, for look how hard it is to tell me anything.”

The big takeaway, in my mind, is not that I’m gifted or make no mistakes or am exceptionally clever, or anything like that. It’s that the solution to a problem that actually works, very, very often, is something different from what was envisioned by the person who posed the problem. Okay, not very often in general; let’s say, very often among the problems that have already been given a good-faith effort, and remained standing with all previous attempted solutions having failed. This is less a matter of learned experience, than a matter of logic. If all solutions that follow a general structure, let’s call it a general structure of A, have failed, we’re looking then at three possibilities: 1) the problem is unsolvable; 2) we have failed in our effort to implement all possible solutions that follow A; 3) there is a solution that is !A. It only requires a casual contemplation to realize the first two possibilities are exceptionally unlikely.

Telling Management So, yes. The solution that works is not the solution that was envisioned…by the person who only conceived of it, didn’t actually run any tests. That’s why it works, it’s the product of validation. That’s also why it’s different.

But, if you’re working in the wrong place, management doesn’t want to see your solution. They want to see their solution, put together by someone who actually writes code…that actually solves the problem. This can create issues during implementation. It’s not a rare circumstance by any means, in which you’ll make the unpleasant discovery that “it can’t work that way,” and if a solution is to be found that’s actually effective, the paradigm will have to shift. This often heralds a similar issue during presentation to management, which is not always pleased to see the conundrum emerge. A lot of the time, given the choice between a solution that breaks the desired form, vs. leaving the problem unsolved, they’d prefer the latter. It’s become clear to me I’d go much further in being a good fit anywhere & everywhere, if I knew better how to anticipate this. I know I have a handicap there. Just coming up with solutions to the problems? By comparison, that’s a piece of cake.

Well, we’re all like these “I’d rather it stay busted” managers. We have good reason to be. A “Wankel Engine” idea that can solve an unsolvable problem, by operating outside of an established framework, might very well create a hundred new ones. So when you do come up with a new idea, you have to anticipate the resistance. It’s wrong, I think, to ascribe this to narrow-mindedness among the people providing the resistance. You can’t say they’re doing something completely illogical, understandable as it may be; nor can you say they’re doing something logical that defies understanding. What they’re doing is both understandable and logical, even when it rises to the seemingly absurd level of “We’d rather see the problem remain unsolved.” The problem is with the path-forward. Yes, the new idea might be successfully reconciled with the established framework, so the framework can remain standing, retain its integrity, and the problem can be solved. But such an effort requires time and other resources. Maybe, just maybe, the available solutions that follow the orthodox structure haven’t been exhaustively implemented. Maybe it’s not yet time for the dramatically-different new approach…yet.

Maybe “at least it works” is a false observation. Maybe it’s the new idea that hasn’t been tested adequately.

This all fits in to looking ahead to 2017, which I believe is going to be just as perplexing as 2016 was. I have little doubt, because I’m old enough to have lived through it before. We have a new incoming administration that is “conservative” and it’s going to be rolling back, or at least making motions toward rolling back, some of what was done by the outgoing “liberal” administration. The nation at large, whether or not it’s playing the game of “we’d rather it stay broken,” has opted out of the hot new idea. I personally know how that stings, to the people who had the hot new idea, or were making the motions of having a hot new idea. The key point here is that the liberals, while acting out the true meaning of “liberal” ideologically, are acting out the true meaning of “conservative” within our political process. They’re doing everything they can to thwart the mindset of tomorrow, to disrupt the changing of the guard, so they can hang on to the entrenched, orthodox power structure with bloody fingernails. It falls to the conservatives who are faithful to the legacy definition of conservatism — “no-thank-yew to your hot new idea, it’s a bust, let’s go back to the way things were” — to act like liberals within the process, essentially saying “tomorrow belongs to us, yesterday is yours, it’s a done deal, get over it.”

Shouldn't Be Able to Do That Liberals are having a tough time with this because they’re not learning what all purveyors of hot new ideas need to learn: To have a hot new idea is to endure resistance. You can’t do the one, without going through the experience of the other. It is logical and it is understandable. It’s also unavoidable. It is, you might say, physics. If a vessel on land, sea or in the air moves at any speed, it will encounter a headwind.

This stuff we lately call “liberalism,” in recent years, has been unfortunately coupled with a diseased sort of thinking we might think of as “snowflake-ism.” We could define this at a very high level as non-acceptance of non-acceptance. “How dare you attack my hot new idea with critical, scrutinizing questions about whether it really works and can be practically implemented. Someone should protect me from you.”

If anyone is entitled to this special status, it isn’t liberalism, it’s conservatism. Established methods, established ideas, established frameworks, are established for a reason. There must have been a point, at one time, involved in getting them established. This is why businesses say to other businesses, “give me a quote,” as opposed to “go right ahead and tell me how much to pay after it’s too late to reconsider anything.” Maybe, just maybe, when all’s said & done and all the tests have been applied, we’ll go with the hot new idea and even modify the existing framework so it can be brought into the fold. But when there are other things already working, that’s a big maybe, and there are many tests. For the hot new idea to fail at least one of them, and get pitched out to the landfill, is not at all unexpected. Purveyors of the hot new idea should be anticipating it, and they’re wrong to act abused when called to answer scrutinizing questions, or to subject the idea to an election they might actually lose. The more things that are already working, the more unreasonable that is, and in America there are still a great many things working. It’s a big country.

Every hot new idea should expect to meet up with disagreement. Oh yes, absolutely, that includes this one.

“Automatic” choke. (for automobiles)
Of course, that means nothing to folks who never dealt with them, or with manual carburetor chokes.
- CaptDMO | 12/26/2016 @ 09:48
From my experience, when this happens…”management doesn’t want to see your solution. They want to see their solution”…it doesn’t come from a position of wanting a solution. It comes PURELY from wanting to see THEIR solution because they put in extremely rare “work” in the form of meetings and workshopping El Presidente’s impossible-sounding ‘Idea X’ into something barely workable.

The fact that YOU as an engineer were able to sit down, and using common sense, logic, a few lines of code, a working algorithm, and…you know…ACTUAL work and come up with a better solution in one-hundredth of the man-hours is an anathema to them. THEY are the ones making the big bucks, THEY were the ones that missed golf to sit in a boring meeting struggling to stay awake, THEY are the ones classically-trained in college, THEIR idea should be superior. How dare you! You’re lucky you get to keep your job.
- P_Ang | 12/29/2016 @ 12:21

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My Hot New IdeaMonday, December 26th, 2016

My Hot New Idea
Monday, December 26th, 2016