Industrial modes of work are extremely high-capex biased, so naturally have safeguards against a 1-to-0 outcome. A one shot budget being blown to 0 by narcissistic overvisioning and implosions.
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This is ironically a Soviet-style “planning” failure mode. Promise of a false dawn undermining actual rational planning and derisking impulses.
The capitalist failure mode is to artificially separate out mystification impulse into a phase labeled “brainstorming” or “exploratory”
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Often, when done in a highly privatized, corporate institutional setting, thus has the effect of creating innovation theater on the sidelines of highly conservative shareholder-value-focused bureaucratic chore/cookbook/formula main flow of work.
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I’ve become highly suspicious of “vision” thinking outside an active tinkering/muddling-through experimental activity. The active trial-and-error, even in highly inefficient and unsinspired (= low hit rate) early muddling-through phase, acts as a control rod to prevent meltdown.
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This is not about theory vs practice. Even in purely theoretical work, like physics or writing, there’s a doer context (doing the math, doing the draft writing) vs purely isolated theorizing context created by exercises like say mind-mapping.
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The doer context cannot be a safe-failure pure test environment. It has to be production tinkering/muddling. It has to be at least open-play as they call it in war games. Or field trials over lab trials.
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Half-assed things in a full-assed way > full-assed things in a half-assed way. Prioritize testing half-assed rocket (whole system) rather than a full-assed engine (subsystem) where possible. Of course eventually you have to do both. But sequence for maximal open-world discovery.
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The key is to do half-assed things in a full-assed way rather than full-assed things in a half-assed way.
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