Comment by shalmanese

The way I've used to describe this to people is, most people's mental model is:

<doing a poor job> --- <doing a average job> --- <doing a good job>

Whereas the more accurate mental model is:

<doing nothing> --------------------------------------- <doing a thing> -- <doing the best thing>

The former mental model is intellectually satisfying because you get to infinitely yak shave over every little tradeoff and doing nothing isn't even on your mental radar.

The latter is deeply humblingly mundane and doesn't get to center us as masters of the universe which is why we all initially resist it. Even for the people who become great at it, they become great against their inclinations, and still have to fight the urge at every step.

This doesn't just apply to tech, look at it in politics. How much time do we spend in politics debating policy? Which of our different political philosophies lead to different tradeoffs that are a deep expression of our values? How much time in politics do we spend debating state capacity? A state that can do none of the things, it's irrelevant which of the things we want the state to do. A state that can do more things, almost always just the sheer option of things they can do means they can find a better policy.

And yet policy arguments are just so fun while state capacity arguments are incredibly wonky and depressing.

But I've drawn that same diagram on 100 different whiteboards in front of 100 different juniors and said the same words of "before we figure out how to do the best thing, let's just see if we can even do a thing first" and it seems to have gotten through to an appreciable number of them enough that it feels like a high converting meme.