My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course."
Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D
You'll see capability traps everywhere once you learn about them.
Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.
Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.
Article published in the Summer 2001 edition of California Management Review, yet it never mentioned Y2K, the first thing I thought of when I read the line "fixing problems that never happened". Perhaps it was actually written in 1999 and took a while to get published, because otherwise that seems a very strange omission. The Y2K problem was very much over-hyped by the American news media at the time (no, at no point would airplanes have been falling out of the sky — I literally heard someone say that would happen once — even if no effort had been put into fixing the bug).
But in recent years I have seen people (elsewhere, not on HN) claim that Y2K was a big nothingburger, and all the money spent on fixing the bug was wasted. No, that's not true either. All the money spent on fixing the bug was why it turned into a big nothingburger. Sure, some of that money was wasted, by executives who wanted an "official" Y2K-certified certificate, issued by a consulting firm that had nothing "official" about it except their own say-so. And so they spent $2 million learning what their own employees could have told them for $2,000. THAT money was wasted. But a lot of banks were running old COBOL code that used 2-digit years, and needed to be fixed. The fact that in January 2000, everyone's bank interest was still calculated correctly, and not calculated as if it was January 1900? THAT was entirely due to the vast amounts of money spent paying old COBOL coders to come out of retirement and fix the 2-digit years.
The lesson I learned from that is that it's possible for a problem to be overhyped, even massively overhyped, and yet still be a serious problem. The other lesson I should have learned is that people rarely get credit (I won't go so far as the article authors and say "nobody ever gets credit") for fixing problems that never happened.
Y2K is especially interesting because the fact that the year 2000 would one day occur was entirely foreseeable, and no less probable in 1990 than in 1999. I can hardly think of anything with closer to 100% probability of happening.
The problem is that a lot of people have a very binary view on life. Either something is a complete success or a complete waste of money, rarely do we accept that most projects fall somewhere in the middle.
My issue with this version of explaining the lack of severity of Y2K is that there were lots of countries that were being derided for not taking the issue seriously but did not seem to suffer any ill effects.
- Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been perfect for covid response, but the next governor didn’t want to pay 1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it.
- Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump fired because it was a “bad deal”. In the absence of that team, we got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19.
There’s also the related category of “never blamed for fixing problems poorly, creating even bigger problems”.
Thanks to 9/11, plane cockpits can now be locked from the inside. Now, we have examples of commercial passenger airline pilots locking the doors and committing mass-murder-suicide by plane crash.
For some reason, these stories don’t make the news.
My favorite is how elegant solutions often look simple in retrospect. So if you noodle on a problem for a while and then come up with a clever solution: once you explain it to someone they'll be like, "yeah, of course."
Meanwhile the guy next to you that overcomplicates the problem ends up getting kudos for building something so difficult :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940820 - 24 Jan 2015, 50 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39472693 - 22 Feb 2024, 434 comments
Sterman, Repenning and other collaborators wrote several papers after this one. All fascinating and almost entirely depressing.
Especially since MIT's Sloan school, where system dynamics first became a discipline, is just around the bend from Harvard Business school, where system dynamics first became ignored.
But in recent years I have seen people (elsewhere, not on HN) claim that Y2K was a big nothingburger, and all the money spent on fixing the bug was wasted. No, that's not true either. All the money spent on fixing the bug was why it turned into a big nothingburger. Sure, some of that money was wasted, by executives who wanted an "official" Y2K-certified certificate, issued by a consulting firm that had nothing "official" about it except their own say-so. And so they spent $2 million learning what their own employees could have told them for $2,000. THAT money was wasted. But a lot of banks were running old COBOL code that used 2-digit years, and needed to be fixed. The fact that in January 2000, everyone's bank interest was still calculated correctly, and not calculated as if it was January 1900? THAT was entirely due to the vast amounts of money spent paying old COBOL coders to come out of retirement and fix the 2-digit years.
The lesson I learned from that is that it's possible for a problem to be overhyped, even massively overhyped, and yet still be a serious problem. The other lesson I should have learned is that people rarely get credit (I won't go so far as the article authors and say "nobody ever gets credit") for fixing problems that never happened.
- Arnold bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that would have been perfect for covid response, but the next governor didn’t want to pay 1% the fleet cost per year to maintain it, so he scrapped it.
- Under Obama, SARS v1 was stopped by US health workers that Trump fired because it was a “bad deal”. In the absence of that team, we got SARS v2, which was renamed to COVID 19.
There’s also the related category of “never blamed for fixing problems poorly, creating even bigger problems”.
Thanks to 9/11, plane cockpits can now be locked from the inside. Now, we have examples of commercial passenger airline pilots locking the doors and committing mass-murder-suicide by plane crash.
For some reason, these stories don’t make the news.
erhm, if this figure is close to true i can see what market ai companies is after.
Which loop it belongs to in the model is left as an exercise for the reader.