From Merlin Mann:
If you’ve got more than two priorities, you might as well think you have more than two arms.
Creativity
Appropriate scale
“Scale” became a popular buzz word a couple decades ago. Suddenly everyone was talking about how things scale. At first the term was used to describe how software behaved as problems became larger or smaller. Then the term became more widely used to describe how businesses and other things handle growth.
Now when people say something “won’t scale” they mean that it won’t perform well as things get larger. “Scale” most often means “scale up.” But years ago the usage was more symmetric. For example, someone might have said that a software package didn’t scale well because it took too long to solve small problems, too long relative to the problem size. We seldom use “scale” to discuss scaling down, except possibly in the context of moving something to smaller electronic devices.
This asymmetric view of scaling can be harmful. For example, little companies model themselves after big companies because they hope to scale (up). But running a small software business, for example, as a Microsoft in miniature is absurd. A small company’s procedures might not scale up well, but neither do a large company’s procedures scale down well.
I’ve been interested in the idea of appropriate scale lately, both professionally and personally.
I’ve realized that some of the software I’ve been using scales in a way that I don’t need it to scale. These applications scale up to handle problems I don’t have, but they’re overly complex for addressing the problems I do have. They scale up, but they don’t scale down. Or maybe they don’t scale up in the way I need them to.
I’m learning to make better use of fewer tools. This quote from Hugh MacLeod suggests that other people may come to the same point as they gain experience.
Actually, as the artist gets more into her thing, and gets more successful, the number of tools tends to go down.
On a more personal level, I think that much frustration in life comes from living at an inappropriate scale. Minimalism is gaining attention because minimalists are saying “Scale down!” while the rest of our culture is saying “Scale up!” Minimalists provide a valuable counterweight, but they can be a bit extreme. As Milton Glaser pointed out, less isn’t more, just enough is more. Instead of simply scaling up or down, we should find an appropriate scale.
How do you determine an appropriate scale? The following suggestion from Andrew Kern is a good starting point:
There is an appropriate scale to every human activity and it is the scale of personal responsibility.
Update: See the follow-up post Arrogant ignorance.
Related posts
Art critics versus artists
From Pablo Picasso:
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
Related post: Doing good work with bad tools
Style and understanding
From Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte:
Style is necessary only when understanding is missing. A corollary to this is that sometimes the only way to effectively use something you don’t understand is to copy styles observed elsewhere.
I liked those lines when I first read them. But as I thought about them more, they started to sound sophomoric.
In context, Hoyte is arguing that one should not avoid advanced programming techniques just because they are not in common use. Also, I believe he has in mind a single programmer working in isolation. Hoyte’s statement is easier to accept within those boundaries than when applied more generally, but even in context there is room to disagree.
Novices may not realize that a style is a style. They may confuse what they find necessary with what is necessary.
But style can be the mark of experts as well as novices. Novices may follow a convention because they know no alternative. Experts may be aware of alternatives and deliberately choose the limitations of the same convention.Experts may see the wisdom in convention, or may see convention as a small price to pay out of consideration for other people.
It’s not saying much to say style is only necessary “when understanding is missing.” Understanding is nearly always missing to some extent on any large project. We hardly ever understand what we’re doing so thoroughly that we can completely disregard style.
Related posts
Two contrasting articles on minimalism
This morning I ran across a couple articles on minimalism:
- Minimalism is NOT a viable intellectual strategy (30 Dec 2010)
- Minimalism IS a viable long term intellectual strategy (31 Dec 2010, no longer online)
The former has a sense of humor; the latter does not. The former contains thoughtful criticism; the latter is a knee-jerk reaction. The former makes an interesting argument; the latter quibbles about definitions.
The former article is by Vivek Haldar. I cannot tell who wrote the latter.
Here’s an excerpt from Haldar’s article:
The zenith … is a calm geek, sitting in a bare room with a desk upon which sits only a MacBook Air, his backpack of possessions on one side, the broadband Internet cable available but unplugged, fingers ready to type into the empty white screen of a minimalist editor.
I think that’s pretty funny. And I would hope that minimalists would be able to get a chuckle out of it.
But Haldar does not just lampoon hipster minimalism. He argues that you need periods of stimulation and clutter to be creative. He also argues that minimalism has its place.
Now I agree with most of the premises of the minimalists … My gripe is with the way they sell it as a way of life. It’s much more valuable as a periodic phase of life.
Minimalism cannot be a long-term strategy, but it makes an excellent short-term tactic.
The second article essentially argues that Haldar has the definition of minimalism wrong.
Minimalism, at its core, is the process of prioritizing your life and working towards concrete goals without giving in to distraction. … Like any school of thought with a certain critical mass, there is dissent and corruption among the ranks.
Who can find fault with prioritizing your life, working toward concrete goals, and avoiding distraction? And who wants to defend corruption? But this is just quibbling about definitions. By contrast, Haldar makes an argument independent of such a definition. Haldar argues that a certain set of attitudes and behaviors — however you want to label them — are not conducive to sustained creativity.
Here are some ideas I threw out a while ago on defining minimalism.
“Minimal” literally means an extreme. I appreciate moderate minimalists, though strictly speaking “moderate minimalist” is a contradiction in terms. A more accurate but unwieldy name for minimalists might be “people who are keenly aware of the indirect costs of owning stuff.”
… you could define a minimalist as someone who wants to eliminate non-essential possessions … But by that definition, Donald Trump would be a minimalist if he believes everything he owns is essential.
Generic discussions of minimalism are fluff. Haldar’s argument is more substantial because he makes a specific suggestion.
Related posts
Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy
From Magic School Bus:
Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.
Magic School Bus is an educational television show for children. The quote above is often repeated by the main character of the show, Ms. Frizzle.
Too many programs that supposedly teach science only teach results from science. Magic School Bus does both. It teaches specific facts, such as the names of the planets, but it also teaches that science is about taking chances, making mistakes, and getting messy.
Related post: Preparing for innovation
Maybe you only need it because you have it
Some cities need traffic lights because they have traffic lights. If one traffic light goes out, it causes a traffic jam. But sometimes when all traffic lights go out, say due to a storm, traffic flows better than before.
Some buildings need air conditioning because they have air conditioning. Because they were designed to be air conditioned, they have no natural ventilation and would be miserable to inhabit without air conditioning.
Some people need to work because they work. A family may find that their second income is going entirely to expenses that would go away if one person stayed home.
It’s hard to tell when you’ve gotten into a situation where you need something because you have it. I knew someone that worked for a company that sold expensive software development tools. He said that one of the best perks of his job was that he could buy these tools at a deep discount. But he didn’t realize that without his job, he wouldn’t need these tools! He wasn’t using them to develop software. He was only using them so he could demonstrate and sell them.
It may be even harder for an organization to realize it has been caught in a cascade of needs. Suppose a useless project adds staff. These staff need to be managed, so they hire a manager. Then they hire people for IT, accounting, marketing, etc. Eventually they have their own building. This building needs security, maintenance, and housekeeping. No one questions the need for the security guard, but the guard would not have been necessary without the original useless project.
When something seems absolutely necessary, maybe it’s only necessary because of something else that isn’t necessary.
Related post: Defining minimalism
You can be a hero with a simple idea
Yesterday I mentioned someone who published a scholarly paper in 1994 for a technique commonly taught in freshman calculus. There’s been a lot of discussion of this (the paper, not my blog post) on the web. The general take has been that this was an egregious failure in the peer review system. No one recognized a simple, centuries-old idea. No one called up a high school math teacher and asked “Hey, have you seen this before?” All that is true, but here’s a different take on the situation.
The paper reinventing the trapezoid rule has been cited 75 times. It must have filled a need. Yes, the author was ignorant of basic calculus. But apparently a lot of other doctors are just as ignorant of calculus. The author did the medical profession a service by pointing out a simple way to estimate the area under a glucose-response curve. The technique was not original, and should not have been published as original research, but it was valuable.
Surely some doctors already knew how to find the area under a glucose-response curve. But apparently many others did not, and they learned something useful from the article. The article did some good, more good than original but arcane articles that no one reads, even though it was poor scholarship.
The author made a connection that not everyone else had made. This reminds me of Picasso’s sculpture Head of a Bull.
All Picasso did was put handle bars on top of a bicycle seat and say “Hey, that looks like a bull.” His sculpture took zero technical skill, but it was clever. Was Picasso the first human to ever have this idea? Maybe.
Sometimes you can be a hero by taking what is common as dirt in one context and applying it to a new context.
Related posts
Fairy dust on the diploma
When I was in college, a friend of mine gave me a math book that I found hard to get through. When I complained about it, he told me “You’re going to finish a PhD someday. When you do, do you think there’s going to be fairy dust on the diploma that’s going to enable you to do anything you can’t do now?”
That conversation stuck with me. I realized that I just needed to work hard rather than wait for my intelligence to mysteriously rise at graduation.
Two kinds of generalization
From George Pólya:
There are two kinds of generalizations. One is cheap and the other is valuable. It is easy to generalize by diluting a little idea with a big terminology. It is much more difficult to prepare a refined and condensed extract from several good ingredients.
Related post: Jenga mathematics