I have actually saw quite a few examples of Inversion
* Herta Herzog laid the foundation for the basis of modern media psychology, but simply inverting.
What do media do to people --> What people do with media.
This shifts focus from strong media influences to human being an active consumer of media.
* In statistical testing is fundamentally based on the principle of inversion, if the resulting statistic can be used as an evidence to reject the null or favour the alternative.
Perhaps always invert but after approaching the problem from the front.
I would apply the 80/20 rule from both directions (so in theory perhaps spending up to 40% effort) to get the best chance of success. And really, you can't invert without first knowing enough about the problem you're trying to solve.
This follows the way my brain works too. Dog into the problem -> invert -> learn more about problem -> uninvert -> map problem in much greater detail -> reinvert -> discover truth -> solution
Why only invert? For example when designing a car, don't just consider putting the steering wheel in the front or in the back. But also consider left and right.
This seems to line up really nicely with "Jobs-to-be-Done Theory" proposed by Clayton Christensen and Co [1]. This inversion approach seems like a great technique to help move from thinking about products and think about the jobs that need doing.
Funny a few years ago I thought that Failure Oriented Design could be a nice starting point. Think about all the failures/errors, the remaining space will then be a safe playground.
> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?
Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
Yeah a direct inversion doesn't seem to work. I think you invert the idea but with the premise that you don't want to do it.
So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
I think this works anyway. Another example:
Goal: Fly to Spain
Question: How do I fly to Spain?
The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
In what situations do the answers to the inverse differ from the original? It seems to me it's just a rewording of the original question with a double negative.
Good point - the 'fly to Spain' example wasn't the best. Running through multiple things in my head.. it seems the most powerful thing is to have a good initial question so the inversion actually helps.
But that isn't really an inversion, more a double negative.
The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?". Your result would be "how do I avoid not keeping my pilots alive?", which is just the original question.
> The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?".
Pretty much that, except in any long-standing industry, it's framed as "what does kill pilots?" and "Lets study the last few decades of pilot mortality data and identify causes". Safety standard improve one Air-crash Investigation at a time.
"The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" by Sidney Dekker is probably where to start with that field.
I imagine a single negation would increase the solution space so much that it wouldn't be useful anymore. A double negation will change the question format, so our (irrational) minds treat it differently, yet keep the solution space the same.
It might be irrational in some cases, but it also might have to do with the double negation of a statement not being practically equivalent to the statement, as in constructive mathematics.
I have read about mathematician Abraham Wald's operational research for the US on WWII aircraft armor placement. Wald challenged the instincts and conventional wisdom of military commanders who thought that more armor should be added to the places on airplanes that had the most bullet holes upon returning from a mission.
Wald instead flipped it and recommended armor be added to the areas with less or no combat damage on returning airplanes because the shot-up areas were the parts of the plane that COULD withstand damage, since the plane had made it back.
The inversion principle is a great mental model in my opinion. The best way I can sum it up in the most basic way is instead of thinking "What can I do to [achieve goal]?", think "What is preventing me from [achieving goal]?".
If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
Interesting way of describing/thinking about hazard or risk analysis which is applied in many industries through ISO standard frameworks such as ISO 14971 for medical devices (but is also used elsewhere). Risk analysis complements requirements analysis in that risk mitigation plans become requirements of the system (if the risks meet some threshold).
I came here to note the same thing, from an aerospace perspective.
In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
As a software developer I have been doing this exact thing for the past twelve years: think of all the possible reasons why something can fail.
The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
For me, it has made driving difficult. I think of everything I can do incorrectly and everything others can do incorrectly. I think of all possible events happening on the route. On the plus side, I am a careful driver. On the negative side, I _really_ hate driving.
I think this is healthy and actually comports with reality. Driving _is_ dangerous, and a lot of people do it really badly. I see way too many people on their phones on the highway to ever feel safe driving.
I agree. Now recently after having spent days reading and thinking about a legal agreement with another company, I'm wondering, why am I so careful with that, but at the same time accept being a passenger in other people's cars -- when I know some of those drivers text-and-drive, making them as dangerous as drunk drivers.
Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours,
So it's not just me being paranoid. If my luck is any worse and the worse possibility happened, I've already hit 5+ people and crashed my cars 5+ more times.
Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
Apparently everyone experiences an accident once per every 17.9 years of driving.
My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car.
So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
Can be very difficult when you can only see the problems in other people's ideas. Knowing that it's not the purpose, but rather to actually help, people that don't know you will not appreciate it.
My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
There is a secondary issue on this sort of thinking too. Sometimes you can doom out anything worth doing. I see it on the internet quite a bit. "look at the cool project I built". Then come out the doomsayers. How everything is wrong with it. The opposite happens too. But the negative ones stick out in my mind this morning :)
> The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
I wanted to contribute the same to this discussing.
At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.
Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.
It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
Yes, I am exactly the same. While at work I feel very productive eliminating future risk by being very conspicuous towards all design decisions, but the same attitude in "real life" is very troublesome.
For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up:
- Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused).
- Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :)
- doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue
- furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the
wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries)
- risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.)
For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life.
[edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1].
Yeah sounds familiar. I feel it's related to stress and to not taking time to stop thinking or make myself stop thinking (and indeed do sports or play with the kids, while first clearing my head).
I have had moments where I felt I was almost loosing it because I was just constantly thinking about some (in hindsight minor) issue. And I then start to meditate just to stop the thinking. I don't know if that helps or if there is a natural cadence to it but I do get better after doing that for some days usually (10-15 min here and there, I used the free tier of HeadSpace during 1 period as well). I should just also meditate regularly to see if my general mood improves. From everything I read, it should.
I am about to go camping, that will help, although I'm already getting pissed (and finding nice ways to express said emotion) at that fictitious family with the bluetooth speaker on all day in the spot next to me. What a waste of thought. Just stop brain.
I can relate to this. Let me ask you a thing: when you ship things (release a product), do you feel lifted/happy like ppl here tell you, or does your worries increase (like it happens for me, I hate shipping)
When the code works the way I want it to for the version I’m about to release.
Like if I’ve finished the code for v1.6 and am ready to ship it to customers, I feel great. When I actually send it to customers my anxiety kicks in thinking of all the support requests and criticism I’m about to get.
+1 for reducing caffeine intake. Some years ago I used to wake up in the middle of the night with extreme anxiety about ridiculously small problems. Cutting caffeine can definitely help (although it may also have an adverse effect on work efficiency :)
It seems like you get caught in a worry loop. The solution I’ve found is I have to fully answer the questions in my head. Worry loops happen when things get almost resolved, then you move on. For example:
> Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Really answer the question. Something like “at 10pm I’ll go over and ask them to have it off by 11pm. If it’s not off by midnight, I’ll make a noise complaint”. Or “If it’s too loud, I’ll ask them to turn it down a bit.” Or “I’ll trust myself to make the right decision if that happens.” Then consider it resolved. Write it down if that helps.
I'll try that, thanks! I did do something similar once when I could not stop fussing about what job to take (current one or a new one). I wrote and printed 2 a4-papers full of text and it was pretty clear I liked my current job more but was afraid I was just taking the easy route (and that I would feel weak because of it later). I was able to let it go and feel better after that indeed.
May I chime in with some more practical experience WRT writing down worries:
- I tried something similar to this Negative Thinking Analysis Form [1]
- In my experience this takes a lot of time, when you try to do it right. You really have to let a thought sink in for a long time to actually find out where it is distorted. And it sometimes even takes longer to find the underlying thought behind a series of thougts and worries.
- But once done the thinking is usually over and sometimes I learned something about the beliefs that underpin my thinking.
Best advice I've ever been given: Wait to worry. If you can't do something (anything) about it immediately, don't worry about it.
Using your example, you haven't decided to restructure your roof, so there is nothing actionable you can do right now WRT your neighbor, so don't worry about that.
Funnily enough I'm really good at this at work and always tell my colleagues this. They often find me ridiculously relaxed in difficult situations. But at work, if I can't change something I don't worry (when a boss asks me 10 min before an important meeting to present it, I just wing it because the thought "They can't expect it to be perfect with only 10 min prep time", makes me very relaxed. But the thing is, with the small things I do worry about at home I often can change something. I can prevent the neighbor to be bothered by my new roof or at least I could talks with them about it. Of course, that only makes sense when we actually change the roof... But then again if they know we may change the roof they can also keep that in mind... At this point just tell the neighbor, but what if we never change the roof and he changes his plans based on my remark? I'd better move somewhere else quickly...
I can relate to this a lot. A technique you might wish to entertain is the "beginners mindset". The idea is to approach a situation or problem as if you were tackling it for the first time, or had absolutely no prior context to work from.
The thinking being that some (all?) of the side assumptions your brain is fixating upon developing responses to, could in fact be erroneous. By experimenting with adopting a "noob" mindset, you create the opportunity for new experiences to emerge which may well be more successful.
To all of the people who feel similarly, and have problems ruminating:
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
God, yes, this. I have twenty years's of failure-mode engineer mindset training, and my wife has generalized anxiety. Between the two of us, we are constantly in this state of trying to prevent bad things from happening.
And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.
But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.
It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
How about asking yourself a new question. "How can we make sure that we never try anything new or experience happy surprises?" and try to avoid doing that?
I think being stuck at home in a ball of anxiety is a fair response to the current pandemic and general situation. Be kind to yourself - this is a rational response.
I'm sure the two of you can come up with new adventurous things to do and the will to do so now you've identified the problem.
Something I've taken to doing is a pre-mortem with my team. A few months before launch I say "Let's fast forward and pretend the project failed. Why did it fail."
This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
The article gets it right, but "man muss immer umkehren," is better translated as "man must always turn upside down", "inside out," "turn back" or "reverse" depending on the context.
In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
To turn a piece of clothing inside out is "auf Links ziehen", which is hard to translate. I find "inside out" to be quite the intuitive metaphor.
The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
According to the wikipedia page about Jacobi, in the mathematical context the best translation is invert.
Also in Italian (my language)it is used the verb 'invertire' in this context.
One of the ways to apply this inverted thinking is to conduct a "pre-mortem" at the start of a project. By deliberately imagining that something has failed, and speculating about the reasons, you can sometimes uncover useful steps that prevent those imagined failures from actually happening.
I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
I think it depends on the scenario selected. I’ve found pre-mortems annoying, and given any number of risks that could materialise how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion?
Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
> how do you choose the right one for the pre-mortem for maximum value discussion?
Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty sensible and important to me to try to imagine various realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them. To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak of nuclear war.
Then in reality the website is down due to the simplest things that's so common we don't reconsider it, such as user input some special characters that makes the server error.
Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention
It's also a useful way of making people not feel like party-poopers.
Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there are bosses around).
A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the project has turned out to be a disaster).
Conducting a pre-mortem, as you describe it, is almost precisely what STPA (Nancy Leveson) is about. You think of the system's behavior and present design and the things that can go wrong. Then you try to determine what would lead to bad or erroneous outcomes, and build in controls based on that analysis. Sometimes it's things that should be blindingly obvious, but we've demonstrated over the past 60+ years of higher technology use and development that we aren't good at spotting those things. Even simple things like, "The lawn mower should have a dead-man switch" is often forgotten.
It seems to me that a better English equivalent to umkehren would be turn around. That also fits the text of the article better. That is to say look at the problem from the other side, form another angle. Invert is simultaneously too specific (leading to formulaic methods) and too ambiguous (leading to pointless discussions of whether it means considering putting the steering wheel at the back or on the other side when in fact it means do both).
> He is said to have told his students that when looking for a research topic, one should 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), reflecting his belief that inverting known results can open up new fields for research, for example inverting elliptical integrals and focusing on the nature of elliptic and theta functions.[8]
> The great mathematician Jacobi is said to have
inculcated upon his students the dictum: Man muss immer
umkehren. One must always seek a converse, turn a thought
the other end to.
It seems to have a strong sense around "returning to a previous place / state", not just "turn around". Which is where the mathematical use of "invert" comes from, because an inverted function swaps the domain and range. But also words like "repent" being a possible translation; to repent of your actions and thus (ideally) return to a previous state of innocence.
It seems like a good model, but probably because it helps you see things from a new angle.
That is, the benefit is not focusing on (not (not A)) instead of A -- with the right choice of A you can flip those, but rather when everyone is thinking about A, see if a double inversion offers new solutions. My 2c
I'd never thought of Charlie Munger as a pomo, but here we are?
Next thing you know the POTUS will be engaging in a supplementary play of meaning which defies semantic reduction?
Pedantry for those who have implicitly asked for it:
Munger spots binary hierarchical oppositions, such as between forwards and backwards, seeking and avoiding, or intelligence and stupidity, and displaces the privileged term, what we take implicitly to be primary, by inviting us to consider the secondary term in its own right, as another endpoint of the same relationship.
(Is this process somewhat like Category Theory's displacement of objects by consideration of the arrows between them? Attacking problems by inverting to generate coproblems?)
In combinatorial optimization, the basic principle is is always: every primal, has a dual. That is, minimazing some expressions, means maximizing the other. Primal-dual would also - I feel - fit better to the principle, as described in this article.
If you started with "what is preventing adoption?" you would explore the answers to that question first, and then would still gain additional insight from asking "how do I increase adoption?".
My uncle has a similar saying: "The most important consideration in any situation is the alternative". He's a very smart man and an excellent engineer.
Something tells me OP hasn't read Polya "How to solve it" and is attempting a bad rediscovery of a tiny aspect of the overall body of problem-solving tactics.
Reminds one of PG's "just don't die and you become rich" advice for startup founders.
FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
That reminds me of the foreword in the High Output Management, written by Ben Horowitz and Andy Grover's words "only the paranoid survive":
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”
179 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 529 ms ] thread* Herta Herzog laid the foundation for the basis of modern media psychology, but simply inverting.
What do media do to people --> What people do with media.
This shifts focus from strong media influences to human being an active consumer of media.
* In statistical testing is fundamentally based on the principle of inversion, if the resulting statistic can be used as an evidence to reject the null or favour the alternative.
I would apply the 80/20 rule from both directions (so in theory perhaps spending up to 40% effort) to get the best chance of success. And really, you can't invert without first knowing enough about the problem you're trying to solve.
Solving smaller problems in the service of the bigger one is as powerful as flipping the problem upside down.
[1] - Competing Against Luck - https://www.amazon.com/Competing-Against-Luck-Innovation-Cus...
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
What does this say about the tractability of enumerating possible failures? :P
> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?
Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)
Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.
So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?
You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?
I think this works anyway. Another example:
Goal: Fly to Spain
Question: How do I fly to Spain?
The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)
("How do I not not fly to Spain?")
How do I not lose money? - Don’t gamble.
How do I not not make money? - Take more risks.
A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.
The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?". Your result would be "how do I avoid not keeping my pilots alive?", which is just the original question.
Pretty much that, except in any long-standing industry, it's framed as "what does kill pilots?" and "Lets study the last few decades of pilot mortality data and identify causes". Safety standard improve one Air-crash Investigation at a time.
"The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" by Sidney Dekker is probably where to start with that field.
Wald instead flipped it and recommended armor be added to the areas with less or no combat damage on returning airplanes because the shot-up areas were the parts of the plane that COULD withstand damage, since the plane had made it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald
If you want to be in Spain, why aren't you there right now?
In general, instead of "how do we achieve $X?" the inversion is "what is stopping $X?" or "what would cause $X to fail?".
If some of you like this, I suggest delving into the 'mental model' rabbit hole. There's some pretty inspiring stuff on it.
In a formal development following something like ARP4754A even before one works on the requirements that a system has to meet, the high level system functions are considered and a Functional Hazard Assessment is done to look at the criticality of those functions failing. Then one can add requirements and architectural mitigations as the system and Safety Assessment is developed.
The downside is that I have trained my mind in such a way that it is difficult to turn it off outside of work and it is influencing my personal live negatively.
(or maybe I'm just wired to be a doom thinker and that is what makes me a good software engineer)
Or they don't keep the distance to the car in front, or try to overtake two large trucks at once, limited sight. Should I be fine with that, saving me a few hours,
Whilst spending days reading an agreement?
Driving is very very dangerous but not many realized it.
My wife just got hit by a truck on the freeway yesterday. Amazingly there was not a scratch on her. It made us re-evaluate what we drive though as when we checked our car had only a 2 star safety rating and apparently where we live 2/3 of fatal crashes are from 1 and 2 star safety rated cars. Today we're car shopping for a 5 star safety rated car.
So, yeah it carries an inherent risk and it's important we do what we can in terms of driving safely, driving the safest car you can afford and upgrading to a safer car when you can afford in order to minimize those risks.
My advice is to stop doing it with people that don't know how you think. It's usually the people who have unexpected problems again and again in their life.
The basis of the advice is I have a hard problem --invert problem statement--> new perspective/approach angles.
Your problem is just a little more meta.
I think it's important to remember taking on too little risk can be dangerous and lead to negative outcomes.
Maybe you need to invert and ask questions like "What is keeping me from spending more time with family?" or "What is keeping me from going to more parties?" or "What is keeping me from asking that person out?" or whatever the situation is in your personal life.
At work, I'm really good at thinking things through and avoiding unnecessary work. Outside of work, I worry that when we restructure our roof, we will negatively impact the neighbors solar panel output. I constantly grind about how I'm going to discuss this with them. Even though we may not even restructure the roof.
Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Now the wife and kids want chickens, and I'm sitting here discussing (in my head) how our neighbor is wrong about all the downsides she may bring up. Even though she may even like that we have chickens.
It's tiring and impacts my life negatively.
At work I do manage to keep a "do-ers" attitude, I mean I will start many things, take in criticism, change my approach. I think I'm generally pretty good at my job and radiate a positive attitude. I wish I was the same at home.
For example, a very small random sample of thoughts that routinely pop up:
- Lent somebody your bike? Oh my god he/she may die, because it's badly maintained (and thinking about the details about different kinds of breakage vs. harm caused).
- Opening plastic containers or cans for food: oh my god, sharp edges may fall into the food (how to keep parts of packaging from falling into food while opening is surprisingly complex topic, think about knifes vs. scissors vs. tearing it open, all have very different hehaviour wrt. creating debris :)
- doing mistakes when filing taxes vs. the risk and penalties that may ensue
- furniture / cupboards being insufficiently bolted to the wall and coming down (and thinking about how it would move, where it would hit and the likelhood of bad injuries)
- risk of injuries due to electricity after fixing electric installation at home (am I sure I didn't damage some insulator, is the ground wire really properly attached, is the strain-relief properly done etc.)
For me this is pretty much modulated by stress level. Doing a lot of sports, less coffee, and sleeping enough usually leaves me much less inclined of doing these not so helpful analysis for stuff outside work. And I'm always amazed how other people can just "wipe away" such thoughts as unnecessary without any analysis at all. Maybe that's the difference between employing proper intuition vs. striving for "mathematical proof" kind of certainty in all areas of life.
[edit] adding another perspective that is sometimes helpful in stopping overthinking: trying to analyse the full tree of possibilities is the chess computer kind of reasoning (alpha-beta search). It is pretty limited in what domains it can be applied to (e.g. it does not work for Poker or the Game of Go). On the other hand try to learn some Go and feel the difference: after gaining some experience you will give up on exhaustive analysis in many situations and just start relying on intuition, because it's the only thing that actually works for complex, unclear situations. Now sometimes I try to remember how playing Go feels when faced with real-world problems where I'm tempted to do an exhaustive analysis. See also [1].
[1] https://xkcd.com/761/
I have had moments where I felt I was almost loosing it because I was just constantly thinking about some (in hindsight minor) issue. And I then start to meditate just to stop the thinking. I don't know if that helps or if there is a natural cadence to it but I do get better after doing that for some days usually (10-15 min here and there, I used the free tier of HeadSpace during 1 period as well). I should just also meditate regularly to see if my general mood improves. From everything I read, it should.
I am about to go camping, that will help, although I'm already getting pissed (and finding nice ways to express said emotion) at that fictitious family with the bluetooth speaker on all day in the spot next to me. What a waste of thought. Just stop brain.
Like if I’ve finished the code for v1.6 and am ready to ship it to customers, I feel great. When I actually send it to customers my anxiety kicks in thinking of all the support requests and criticism I’m about to get.
> Or I wonder how I'm going to handle it the next time my neighbor turns on an outdoor speaker. Even though he may not, for months to come, and when he does, I might just be on my way out.
Really answer the question. Something like “at 10pm I’ll go over and ask them to have it off by 11pm. If it’s not off by midnight, I’ll make a noise complaint”. Or “If it’s too loud, I’ll ask them to turn it down a bit.” Or “I’ll trust myself to make the right decision if that happens.” Then consider it resolved. Write it down if that helps.
- I tried something similar to this Negative Thinking Analysis Form [1]
- In my experience this takes a lot of time, when you try to do it right. You really have to let a thought sink in for a long time to actually find out where it is distorted. And it sometimes even takes longer to find the underlying thought behind a series of thougts and worries.
- But once done the thinking is usually over and sometimes I learned something about the beliefs that underpin my thinking.
[1] http://discoveryoursolutions.com/toolkit/negative_thinking.h...
"How can I guarantee that I will spend absolutely all of my time grinding on projections of the future?"
Using your example, you haven't decided to restructure your roof, so there is nothing actionable you can do right now WRT your neighbor, so don't worry about that.
The thinking being that some (all?) of the side assumptions your brain is fixating upon developing responses to, could in fact be erroneous. By experimenting with adopting a "noob" mindset, you create the opportunity for new experiences to emerge which may well be more successful.
Try thinking in terms of probabilities - that's the real way out, to recognize that all of the negative scenarios you keep replaying in your head are very unlikely to happen at all.
Once you realize that much it might get easier to brush these thoughts aside sooner.
And, in many ways we have. And that's good. We're in a pretty stable, safe, comfortable state, which not something everyone can say in 2020.
But as an unintended side effect, we have also prevented good things from happening. Because we are so focused on controlling outcomes, we have eliminated almost all serendipity from our lives. The only surprises left are unpredictable, unpreventable bad ones: health issues, political disasters, stuff breaking in the house, etc.
It is a recipe for slow-burning misery. Even before COVID-19, we found ourselves going out less and less, trying fewer new things, and just... sort of winding our way into an introverted, over-thinking, ball of anxiety.
I'm now trying to re-train myself to consider the inverse of that mindset: what's the best that could happen? If we knew for certain that activity X was going to work out, would we give it a try? Do we need to keep thinking about and analyzing this, or is our anxiety just using "you need to think about it more" as a rationalization to keep us inside our comfort zone?
It's a hard habit to break. And, obviously, 2020 is like the worst possible fucking year to be dealing with this. (Though, conversely, we entered the lockdown pretty well-prepared to handle being stuck at home since we're so used to it...)
I'm sure the two of you can come up with new adventurous things to do and the will to do so now you've identified the problem.
Yes, true. Would have been nice if we hadn't been like that before the pandemic, though. :)
This usually catches a list of things to make sure you're keeping an eye on.
I very much like the idea
May I ask what situations do you have in mind?
> influencing my personal live negatively.
What if everyone else is crazy not you
In Afrikaans, "omkeer" is derived from the Germanic umkehren and would be used as changing direction (in a military sense) or upside down as in 'leave no stone unturned.'
Strangely, nowadays I would refer to inverting your trousers as "binneste-buite" (inside-out) or "uitkeer" in Afrikaans: roughly 'about face'.
The idea is that clothes have a "right" side (rechts) and a "left" side (links), and you pull it (ziehen) so that the left side is visible, i.e. on the outside.
Someone wrote that the terms left and right come from knitting where the right side is the flat side, and thus worn on the outside. Not sure whether that holds water.
"Man mus immer umkehren"
with
"One always has to return"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi
I've found this can be quite useful, both for minimizing risk, and also (interestingly) as a source for new product/feature ideas.
Plus I generally dislike the idea and feel like its a trend that should go away.
Isn't that where domain expertise comes in? It sounds pretty sensible and important to me to try to imagine various realistic failure modes and preemptively try to prevent them. To not let the website go down, pre-empting hard drive failure or DDoS makes a lot more sense than worrying about network cables spontaneously disintegrating, or the outbreak of nuclear war.
Edit: I'm not downplaying the importance of prevention
Seems to me that bugs is then a high risk in that project. And to prevent or reduce the number of failures, the project needs an auto test suite
Typically, everyone's excited at the start of a project and people are reticent to share their fears (especially if there are bosses around).
A pre-mortem gives them the mental freedom to share their fears as they are asked to imagine they are in a future where the project has turned out to be a disaster).
See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/umkehren
Edit: fixed typo.
It also seems the common english translation: https://www.google.com/search?q=invert+always+invert
To be fair though:
While his Wikipedia entry has the sentence:
> He is said to have told his students that when looking for a research topic, one should 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), reflecting his belief that inverting known results can open up new fields for research, for example inverting elliptical integrals and focusing on the nature of elliptic and theta functions.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_Jacob_Jacobi#Scien...
The attributed source for that, a paper from 1916, differs in the translation:
https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1916-23-01/S0002-9904-1916...
> The great mathematician Jacobi is said to have inculcated upon his students the dictum: Man muss immer umkehren. One must always seek a converse, turn a thought the other end to.
https://dict.leo.org/german-english/umkehren
It seems to have a strong sense around "returning to a previous place / state", not just "turn around". Which is where the mathematical use of "invert" comes from, because an inverted function swaps the domain and range. But also words like "repent" being a possible translation; to repent of your actions and thus (ideally) return to a previous state of innocence.
That is, the benefit is not focusing on (not (not A)) instead of A -- with the right choice of A you can flip those, but rather when everyone is thinking about A, see if a double inversion offers new solutions. My 2c
Munger spots binary hierarchical oppositions, such as between forwards and backwards, seeking and avoiding, or intelligence and stupidity, and displaces the privileged term, what we take implicitly to be primary, by inviting us to consider the secondary term in its own right, as another endpoint of the same relationship.
(Is this process somewhat like Category Theory's displacement of objects by consideration of the arrows between them? Attacking problems by inverting to generate coproblems?)
Inversion seems like a misnomer and is easily conflated with the logical/mathematical meaning.
FWIW, the best founders I've met within YC or outside of it have this paradoxical quality that takes high optimism about the future of their company and combines it with extreme gritty paranoia about the short-term things that could derail or kill you.
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
But this insight won’t be in any book. When I suggested he write something on the topic, his response was: “Why would I do that? It would be a waste of time to write about how to not follow human nature. It would be like trying to stop the Peter Principle.* CEOs must be optimists and all in all that’s a good thing.”