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by camgunz 2045 days ago
It's not about force multipliers in general. It's about looking at what force multipliers incentivize/deincentivize and amplify/muffle.

With your examples, I would say something like:

OK I once only had a knife, but now I've invented an egg beater. This will allow me to do some things a lot more easily like:

- Bake cakes

- Eat soup

This will also mean I cut myself a lot less when I do decide to do something like eat soup.

So we're gonna have more cakes/soup in the world. Good? Great, egg beater stays. Bad? Woof, burying this thing in the yard. But wait I hate cutting myself. OK I'll figure out some other way to keep myself from gorging on cakes, or I guess be content with that.

So, broadly it's about thinking systemically--how the design of our tools affects how and what we build. Because it definitely has an effect. If it's easier to use a nailer than a screw gun, guess what, you're nailing more stuff. If it's easier to write a PRECONDITION clause in a function definition than a unit test, guess what you're writing a PRECONDITION clause.