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by mwigdahl 58 days ago
I liked Zvi Mowshowitz' summary of this: If someone tells you what's wrong, listen to them. If they tell you how to fix it, ignore them.
4 comments

"Your audience is good at recognizing problems and bad at solving them" - Mark Rosewater (Lead Designer of Magic: The Gathering, from his famous "20 Years, 20 Lessons" GDC talk, http://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/twenty-years-t...)
I heard very similar advice from some investors. They said:

> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.

Very useful way to think about politics. Always remember that people have valid concerns you might not understand... but also that their solutions are probably terrible.
It’s exactly the opposite. Most concerns aren’t valid (even if and especially if they think it is) and most ideas for fixing things aren’t even contemplated let alone attempted.
What's an example of a concern that you don't think is valid?
That you have to lock down the ability to edit the docs in your project wiki because otherwise anyone would be able to edit the wiki.

That we have to lock down installation of unsigned extensions in Firefox on Linux because spyware/nagware in the form of add-ons that re-install themselves have been observed in the wild (on Windows) and caused problems.

Those sound like proposed solutions, not the underlying concerns. Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
> Those sound like proposed solutions

Yes.

> not the underlying concerns

The stated concern embedded in the first example is "anyone would be able to edit the wiki".

> Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".

Right. That's the point. The concern that "anyone would be able to edit the wiki" is not a valid concern. The concern that "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info [if just allow anyone to edit it]" has to be determined through empiricism. Avoiding locking down the wiki and seeing whether it fills up with junk will reveal whether the concern was valid. It's possible that it's an invalid concern and therefore requires no solution.

Yes! Unfortunately, some people with terrible ideas get elected.
Oh, every day citizens have terrible ideas too. Sometimes even worse. Sometimes our elected officials who "don't get anything done" are serving as necessary filters for those terrible ideas.
It’s more like you should have 5-10 readers. If they all say the same thing they’re right. If half think the pacing is too slow and half think it’s too fast you are probably spot on.
It's more likely that your pacing isn't consistent and is both too fast and too slow.