> Of course, this is an extreme success story; most yak shaving fails.
To be fair, this is true for most things. Though that doesn't mean it's useless or not a worthwhile endeavor.I think we often make a mistake by assuming that when there's no visible output that time was wasted. When I was in grad school this hit me, and everyone I knew, pretty hard. But when looking back I think most of the progress I made was entirely invisible. Those "failures" are not so much failures as narrowing the search space. Unless you have a full understanding of the problem before you begin (lol[0]), then this is always going to be true. Which made me change my view on a lot of things and realize you just need to trust people. Help people get unstuck and out of rabbit holes but just because there isn't visible progress doesn't mean there isn't progress. If we try to make all progress visible then the reality is we just misalign from our actual goals. So Yak Shave. There's lots of hidden treasures, even if you don't think it's a treasure at the time [0] bahahaha I'd love to live in that fantasy world. Nothing is so well defined, even when using formal languages like math. Exploration is always required (yes, even in research. No one plans everything before they start working. The difference between researchers and industry is just how much up front strategizing they do. But exploration always happens, even if through different mediums) |