2012 #6 The old rules hold

The IT Skeptic's Skeptical Informer newsletter for 5th December 2012.

Ouch. So much for doing a newsletter weekly. Sorry, busy right now. Which is a good thing as the bills get paid at last after a long drought.

This newsletter is triggered by a quote I paraphrased from my old mate and DevOps sparring partner John "Botchagalupe" Willis. He almost said "Relativity is great but Newtonian physics still matters".

All this exciting new stuff lets us do wonderful things, but it doesn't mean the laws of physics are suspended. Nuclear power doesn't abolish gravity.
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One set of laws distilled over millennia is common sense. And the wild explosion of technology right now doesn't render it obsolete either. I don't care if I'm going to have a mobile phone implanted up my ...er... nose in a few years, the rules will be the same: there's still no free lunch, stupid is as stupid does, there's no substitute for talking to someone, debts must always be paid etc etc...

I tell my son (over and over) that he can not only save himself much pain but also get a shortcut to success by listening to the voices of experience. That was why we invented language; to transmit knowledge. The Ape That Spoke (John McCrone).

Literature from the beginning of time has stories of youngsters who thought they knew more than their elders. When the old farts say something doesn't sound like a great idea, please consider that they may be right.

Look around you at the many instances of pundits "embracing risk" and accepting increased risk as the "price" of innovation or speed or flexibility. But increased risk is not really a price paid because everybody thinks they are too smart and too lucky, that they will get away with risk, that a low probability means something won't happen. Tell that to Christchurch.

We're a vain, stupid, egotistical species. We think we can overcome the laws of common sense. We think we can escape gravity and risk and entropy and death. By the time you get to my age you start to see that's not so.

What goes up must come down.

N.B. This is not a manifesto for pessimism. I'm still an optimist: I'm wildly optimistic that science and rationalism and common sense and building on the wisdom of those who came before will overcome daffy, New Age, post-modernist dippiness and youthful, greedy, vain folly; that they will take us to new heights in the future.


Related posts from the blog (don't forget to check out the comments! Always good):

Risk taking
We are told by the experts that risk can be managed, mitigated, hedged. We all know how well that turned out for the financial industry in the 1980s, again in the 1990s, and again in the 2000s. Are we learning yet?

Note to devops; smaller changes do not equate to less risk
To say smaller frequent changes are less risky is a dangerous fallacy.

Evolution not revolution
The intelligent and civilised way to move forward is evolution: building on the work of others, retaining value and knowledge, growing, changing incrementally.



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