The thing I most worry about using anti-perfectionism arguments is that it begs a vision in the first place—perfectionism requires an idea of what's perfect. Projects suffer from a lack of real hypotheses. Fine, just build. But if you're cutting something important to others by calling it too perfect, can you define the goal (not just the ingredients)? We tend to justify these things by saying, we'll iterate. Much like perfectionism can always be criticized, iteration can theoretically always make a thing better. Iteration is not vision and strategy, it's nearly the reverse, it hedges vision and strategy. This is a slightly different point, but when we say we don't need this extra security or that UX performance, you're setting a ceiling on the people who are passionate about them. Those things really do have limits (no illusions!), but you're not just cutting corners, you're cutting specific corners. That's a company's culture. Being accused of perfectionism justifiably leads to upset that the company doesn't care about security or users. Yeah, maybe it's limited to this one project, but often not.

Perfection can be the enemy of the good. It's that it's not a particularly a helpful critique. To use the article’s concept, it’s the wrong scale. It might be helpful to an individual in a performance review, but it doesn’t say why X is unnecessary in this project or at this company. Little is added to the discussion until I describe X relative to the goal. Perfectionism is indeed good to avoid—it's basically defined as a bad thing by being "too". But the better conversation says how X falls short on certain measuring sticks. At the very least it actually engages X in the X discussion. Perfectionism is more of a critique of the person.

It takes effort to understand the person's idea enough to engage it, but more importantly it takes work that was supposed to (but might not) have gone into developing good projects or goals in the first place. Projects well-formed enough to create constraints for themselves.

I agree with the thesis of this article but I actually think the point would be better made if we switch from talking about optimizing to talking about satisficing[1]. Simply put, satisficing is searching for a solution that meets a particular threshold for acceptability, and then stopping. My personal high-level strategy for success is one of continual iterative satisficing. The iterative part means that once I have met an acceptability criterion, I am free to either move on to something else, or raise my bar for acceptability and search again. I never worry about whether a solution is optimal, though, only if it is good enough. I think that this is what many people are really doing when they say they are "optimizing", but using the term "optimzing" leads to confusion, because satisficing solutions are by definition non-optimal (except by luck), and some people (especially the young, in my experience) seem to feel compelled to actually optimize, leading to unnecessary perfectionism.

Perfectionism is sort of polarizing, and a lot of product manager / CEO types see it as the enemy. In certain contexts it might be, but in others “perfectionism” translates to “building the foundation flawlessly with the downstream dependencies in mind to minimize future tech debt.” Of course, a lot of managers prefer to pretend that tech debt doesn’t exist but that’s just because they don’t think they can pay it off in time before their team gets cut for not producing any value because they were so busy paying off tech debt.

kthejoker2 3 months ago | prev | next [–] Not sure you can talk about perfectionism without clarifying between "healthy" perfectionism and "unhealthy" perfectionism. Both exist, but often people are thinking of one or the other when discussing perfectionism, and it creates cognitive dissonance when two people thinking of the two different modes are singing perfectionism's praises or denouncing its practice.

looking at these comments, it seems perfectionism is ill-defined. it seems to be positive - perfectionism is not giving up, it is excellence, it is beyond mediocre. it also seems to be negative - it is going too far, it is avoiding/procrastinating, it is self-defeating. I wonder what the perfect definition would be?

increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.

Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.

Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.

Boreing said: "your story is inaccurate to the point of being false," though he did not specify a single inaccuracy, nor did he deny that the Daily Wire had sought and obtained a gag order on Owens at the same time they were publicly posturing as wanting a debate with her. The confirmation we obtained of all these facts is indisputable. Boreing added: "I’m sure you can appreciate how fraught a high profile break-up like this is. For that reason, we are trying to resolve our issues with Candace privately."It certainly seems true that the Daily Wire is attempting to achieve all of this "privately." Nonetheless, Ben Shapiro has constructed his very lucrative media brand and persona based on his supposed superiority in debating, a reputation cultivated largely as a result of numerous appearances at undergraduate schools around the country where he intrepidly engages with students who are often in their teens or early twenties. Both Shapiro and the Daily Wire have also predicated their collective media brand on an eagerness to engage in free and open debate with anyone, and to vehemently oppose any efforts to silence people, especially those in media, from expressing their political views.

To me it's pretty clearly the same targeted advertising available anywhere with the extra claim of using "voice data". It doesn't say what the voice data is or where it comes from. They could say that when people do google searches using Siri/OkGoogle/the microphone option on Google - it's information they would use in an anonymized way to target ads, or rather Google does on your behalf, and it's technically a derivative of voice data.

I'm skeptical this is what people might think it is. To be clear, I think most readers would interpret this as "your phone is surreptiously listening to you via your microphone." If that were true, then there would be telltale signs of resource draw. Handling rich audio data has practical costs, whether battery, CPU, network, memory, and/or disk; that data has to be stored, transmitted, and processed somehow. I've never seen analysis that shows that's happening. Not to mention this capability is beyond what audio capture APIs in Android and iOS offer, as far as I know.

Twitter is a cesspool of misinformation right now, with fake accounts, straight-up lies, confident-sounding assertions based on old videos, and people who spent 20 minutes Googling about something trying to correct reporters, academics and researchers who have spent years covering Israel, Palestine, and wars of all kinds.

An explosion at a hospital is not unlike the debate that broke out about precisely how many Israeli children were beheaded or burned alive after Hamas’s attack. Journalistically, it is important for us to get this story right. Morally, the finer details are in some ways not the most relevant. This explosion, whether it was the result of an Israeli rocket or not, has still left rescue crews collecting bodies and remains in a charred parking lot. And while everyone was arguing about who to blame this incident on, Israel did bomb a school run by the United Nations, killing six people. And the situation in Gaza is increasingly desperate.

They killed over 1,500 Hamas fighters in the initial battle. They have flattened dozens of buildings in Gaza — including schools, housing, and health centers. At least 19 journalists have been killed, a sign of how wide-reaching the violence has been. Israel has, in all likelihood, killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians — and the number may already be in the thousands. They have displaced one million people. Senior Hamas leaders are being killed left and right. They’re clashing with protesters in the West Bank, where the resulting violence has also killed people. They are rallying support from allies in Europe and the United States.That is the response. A lot of the commentary assumes Israel should pursue a strategy of uprooting and destroying Hamas, which implies that what we’ve seen so far is only the beginning. But as the U.S. learned in launching a full-scale attack to destroy al-Qaeda, what follows could well be worse. And as I wrote earlier this week, Israel should be careful not to repeat the same post-9/11 mistakes the U.S. made. Israel’s response has already been violent, and it’s been forceful, and it’s been severe.