something about the assumptions behind Tiago's take bugs me but I can't put my finger on it. maybe the underlying lionization of the "super successful". and yeah I agree with you, both cigarettes and soda are fairly benign in moderation.
Conversation
There’s a startup investing rule of thumb that says it’s better to knock one thing out of the park and screw up/phone-in most other things than to get most things to “very good”.
Tiago is right, but you’re also right that it’s very counterintuitive.
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It’s the mediocrity-survival-infinite-game instinct beating out the excellence-aesthetics-finite-game instinct basically. Growing things look messy, unbalanced, awkward. Non-growing things achieve a harmonized aesthetic of “balanced” elements that don’t contradict each other.
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Reminds me of how aeronautical engineers were convinced that ugly planes didn't fly right. That slowed development of supersonic aircraft, which need to be a different shape.
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They weren't entirely wrong though... Boyd famously compared F-104 starfighter to a schoolbus ("how do you improve it? cut off its wings and paint it yellow"). It was stub-winged supersonic, ugly AF and poor performer. There's an ugly duckling effect here
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By contrast mature supersonic aircraft have been beautiful. Just with a different mature supersonic aesthetic.
Similar evolution in stealth. Early stealth = ugly. 3rd gen stealth = lovely.
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I’ve always thought that black triangle plane was aesthetic af
GIF
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Goes back to Northrop flying wing designs from like 30y earlier. From an aero-aesthetics perspective, the lack of a tail fin makes it kinda ugly... I think "aerodynamics literacy" makes you see structural aesthetics differently because you can sense in what ways it will fly badly
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I mean, that's what engineers like to tell people. A few pilots died figuring out that beautiful control surfaces stop working at supersonic speeds. The engineers had to actually test ugly new ideas instead of passing down received wisdom.
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In this example though, I'm making a different point... eliminating tail fins made radar signature much smaller but made the safe control problem harder, not easier. So stealth had a different evolutionary path than supersonic.



