[mechanical_fish]

PG's quote in context:

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.