How to Detect and Eliminate Errors Is the Most Important Knowledge

For new knowledge to be created, there needs to be an error correcting mechanism. This makes it the most important knowledge for progress and innovation.

Traditions of criticism provide the environment needed to find the knowledge to detect and eliminate errors. Without it justificationism stifles new ideas and no progress can be made.

See also:

• From The Beginning of Infinity
• Outdated scientific studies can perpetuate for years despite the scientific community’s tradition of criticism
• If learning is surprise plus memory, maybe the key is learning to be surprised

Links to this note

• Past Experience Is a Repetoire Not a Playbook

  There’s a tendency for new people joining a company to immediately draw from their past and implement the things they’ve seen succeed but there is danger in treating experience as a playbook. It can be introduce prematurely and become too much process at the wrong time. It might not match the context of the new environment and cause more problems.

• Illusion of Explanatory Depth

  People feel they understand things better than they actually do. This leads to biases and poor decision-making because of overconfidence in their knowledge.

• Get Started With Growth Marketing

  Growth marketing is simple to get started. Sell the product directly to 10 paying customers. Review the sales process with those customers and identify an ideal customer profile and their “aha” moment—preferring customers with low friction and grow organically. Experiment with automated ways to acquire the next 100 customers from that profile. Once you’ve built a playbook that works repeatedly, move on to the next cohort.

• Smart People Don’t Like Taking Chances

  Smart people don’t like taking chances because they are afraid of being wrong.

• The Line Between Micro Management and Leadership

  When things are going poorly, a natural response is for managers to get closer to the details. This can come across as micro management to others and they can be defensive about it. There is an important difference between micro management and leadership.

• Circular Specification Problem

  Writing a specification with sufficient detail to know exactly what software one should build is as much work as writing the code itself. In many cases, fully specifying the work beforehand is not possible because we don’t know enough about the problem or the domain to begin with. This is why our codebases are always in a state of flux and never complete systems.

• Knowledge Capture Loops Make for Good Systems

  Real world systems for operating a complicated process don’t start out perfectly designed complete systems. New information reveals itself only after you’ve done it a few times. Failure modes you weren’t aware of become apparent only after the system breaks.