Abstraction

Knowing what works isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing is knowing what ought to work, but doesn’t.-paraphrased from Arnold Kling

One of the best books I’ve read in recent years is Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness. It’s one of those rare books that can forever impact the way you think about the world. In a nutshell, it talks about the fundamental role that random events play in every aspect of our lives, and how people are blind to that randomness. In particular, how successful people are blind to the role that randomness plays in their success.

It turns out that successful people attribute their success to their own choices and abilities to a much greater degree than is warranted. Further, other (less successful) people assume that successful people got that way because they are smarter, more experienced, somehow better, than they.

I was thinking about this in context of my assertion that a product manager is judged based on the success of the product being managed. Perhaps this isn’t true; there are simply too many variables to account for a product’s success. A product manager’s ability should be judged based on the efforts made to improve the likelihood of success, but this is something that’s much more difficult to measure. Besides, I’ve presided over some failures myself; surely these were random events that occurred despite my world class abilities and heroic efforts.

A corollary to this line of thought is that all the “best practices” and checklists associated with a particular activity (including the ones I write) are, at best, activities meant to reduce risk of failure. More to the point, they are activities that have reduced such risk in the past, and so it seems like a good idea to keep doing them.

Or have they? As Arnold Kling points out in this interesting TCS article “best practices” typically are regurgitated, repetitious, and have questionable value.

Articulating what works [...] can have surprisingly little value. Taken out of context, what works will seem obvious. What readers need to know is the larger context, especially what ought to work, but doesn’t.