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by byrneseyeview
6548 days ago
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I do not understand the art. Did pictures of people reading these books really offer anything to someone reading the article? Also, the review of H&P is the worst I've ever read. "Graham is so unabashedly geeky that, though he is a natural writer, he can't help but express himself in metaphors drawn from what he calls "his native land, hacking." (Typical sentence: "When you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.")" Damping oscillations is not a metaphor. It's like reviewing a book by a mathematician who is so geeky he says "Multiply it by 3" instead of "triple it" or "Times it". |
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Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low.
I think the "oscillations" sentence is, in fact, a metaphor: The act of "playing it safe" in design is being compared to the act of damping out some wildly oscillating system. But nothing is actually oscillating here.
A less-metaphoric way of describing the situation would be "when you discard the outliers beyond one sigma, you lose the highs as well as the lows". But that would be double-plus-geeky so PG wisely didn't write that.
And, though as a former physicist I hate to have to say it... to a non-geek, a reference to damped oscillations is very geeky. Eyes will glaze over. I have seen it happen.