• If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point.

  • -- Ezra Pound

Todo

Reorder this document so the ideas are in roughly this order:

• people with great, revolutionary ideas don't believe in them
• this is caused by the spreading out of mental resources, which attenuates "sureness"
• feynman's idea that hard problems require a solid chunk of time to commit to thinking about that problem and nothing else (you build up a house of cards of ideas in your mind)
• our society prizes progress. the world moves so fast nowadays! however, our push for progress could be hindering it. it's short-term thinking. there aren't enough places where a person can spend more than a couple years working on a single problem. we try to break up problems into little research projects that can be done quickly, and if we don't see results, we ignore them an go onto something else. if we really buckled down and tried to tackle something like natural language understanding, it would take a while. there's are so many pieces that it's built on that it's hard to know where to start. it's a lot like trying to build a silicon computer chip starting from a technology level of a caveman -- many tools/technologies must first be created before you can reach your goal. we need solid tracts of time to first discover what the tools that we need are, and then to actually make them.
• then, applications to the world (i.e. google product design, intentional software, etc.)

Draft

I was watching a google engedu video of Jen Fitzpatrick discussing the improvements which user feedback has made to the design of their products. They'd make something like Google News and suddenly start getting tons of feedback from people asking them to be able to customize it to their needs.

I started to realize that, since people are so adaptable, this feedback stage is a very fragile time. If there's a major improvement you could make, the signal from the users may be very weak. As a user, you'll notice the problem quite strongly at first since it really bothers you. But, because it bothers you, you'll start to work around the problem, and eventually you won't notice it anymore. (The workarounds could be using sheets of paper, or figuring out how to rearrange your browser, or whatever. Basically, you change yourself to fit the solution.)

This is the exact same phenomenon that happens when people write huge nasty kludges with code. There will be a library that's badly designed, and for some reason or another the programmer doesn't want to change it. (Because they're afraid of breaking it, or because it's a proprietary library that they can't change, or whatever.) Instead of fixing the fundamental problem, they create big nasty messes that work around the problem. Those, in turn, create more nasty messes, and even if you can somehow manage to whip this pile of crud into a working program, it'll be diffucult to maintain and be far less efficient than it could've been if you'd just fixed the fundamental problem in the first place.

Anyhow, let's get back to the user-feedback issue.

If the discomfort to the users is strong, then the user feedback will be strong and the users will have a hard time adapting. If the discomfort is minor, then the feedback may be strong at first, but will taper off as the users adapt.

HOWEVER, every new user will feel that same discomfort. It'll be an overall barrier to your product being a huge success.

And what's even more interesting to me is that google didn't think of making their page customizable in the first place! I mean, how obvious should that have been? I mean, even the fact that they had to be continuously hammered before they finally caved and included a DELETE button in Gmail amazes me!

If Google's only improves their design when masses of people complain at them, imagine how many great ideas by people with imagination and creativity but who, by their very nature as imaginiative and creative people are small in number, can't emit a deluge of emails.

Things like Intentional Softare which rethink the entire nature of the problem would never come about if not for the weak and subtle imaginings of other completely new possibilities of a problem.

I think the fundamental problem is that human minds are weak. When you imagine a tiny change, you can commit your whole mind to explaining why it's good and you're very sure about yourself. However, as the idea gets bigger -- more complex, made of more smaller ideas -- your mental resources become spread too thin across the whole thing, and you can't really be that sure about it.

As Richard Feynman said once, thinking about ideas in physics is like building a house of cards. Each idea is based on other ideas that may or may not be very shaky, and if you're not very careful and you don't have long periods of time to think about it in depth, the whole thing collapses under doubt.