Is there a term for the human propensity to seek “silver bullet” solutions (or look for a savior) rather than improving what exists?
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This is what’s in play every time we vote in an outsider (then are surprised how long it takes them to ramp up), or “reinvent money” (without understanding the complex system already in use), or rewrite a whole codebase (rather than figuring out the one we have).
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This urge is not always a negative force - sometimes systems do need disruption to get them out of established patterns that no longer serve. Sometimes the timing makes sense.
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But the more times I see this pattern play out - in software systems, political systems, community systems - it seems like 99 times out of 100, when we burn it down & rebuild...we end up rebuilding the same system.
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What I’ve been thinking about lately is this: even when we end up with the same system, WE are changed. We worked through the problems ourselves & figured out the details and muttered to ourselves a bunch, “OH, that’s why that was there.”
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Is this a communication failure? A documentation failure? Or is there something about humans that means we need to do it ourselves to be sure? And if so, ...is that an empathy failure?
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Maybe it’s not a failure at all. Maybe this is how groups of humans work. But all this burning of old systems has a lot of downsides.
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I’ve been thinking about this for two reasons. 1. In the software world, over the course of 20 years working on these systems, I’ve gone from “this is terrible! rewrite it all” to “I don’t see why this needs to be here, so I must not fully understand the problem.”
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2. In other worlds, where I don’t have as much experience understanding their systems, I still tend towards “burn it down” over “understand it better.”
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So: am I too conservative with software systems? Should I burn it down more often? Am I not conservative enough elsewhere? Should I be working harder to figure out how things got the way they are, and what needs they serve?
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As a dyed-in-the-wool incrementalist, my approach is "burn it down and rebuild it, carefully, from within". The bigger the ecosystem around a system, the better this has worked (and the less well my "I'll just rebuild it with obviously better things..." colleagues have performed)
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