Action Is Worth More Than Theory
Early in my life, I looked up to the image of the intellectual thinker. However, meanwhile, I realized that this image is far from reality. This is how I went from adoring what I now see as overthinking, or at least a version of it, to the realization: Nothing beats just bringing things forward.
If you get into discussions about anything, science is regularly being held up as the holy grail of arguments. The initiated know that these kinds of arguments rarely are as flawless as the ordinary person seems to think they are. Not every study or statistic is so unambiguous or flawlessly set up that it beats every argument possible. Many who are sworn into one viewpoint of the argumentation exercise their talent or their arrogance to make the statistic bow to their viewpoint.
Research projects, especially if government financed, are set straight out to get one specific outcome or none at all. They have no flexibility left in them to maybe leave a set out roadmap to explore something else that's promising. This doesn’t mean I say that everything they do is generally worthless. Still, the point stands that much money is thrown out strictly to stick to some naive plans or rigid (bureaucratic) structures that waste time and money.
How is this important? Well, the realization that science is not nearly as flawless and pure as I thought slowly evolved into the viewpoint that the true heroes are actually the doers, not the talkers.
If you actually do something, you can realistically fail, and depending on the outcome, it’s not that unlikely you actually will. Producing results always inherits the risk of the failure that's so despised in our society. If you fail, even if you fail “successfully,” meaning that you proved the idea you had just doesn’t work out, it’s not valued. It’s rather being swept under the carpet. Either by the person themselves or their superiors to not make them look bad. All the while ignoring the fact that despite their outcome, they may just have put progress forward. Even if it only was by saving their successor from doing it all over again and maybe failing at the same point they did, even if that hypothetical successor may have spotted the error or something else that may grow from the previous efforts done. Whatever that was, whatever it may be.
An example I came across recently comes from business studies. They called it ABC analysis. The example was that you divide your goods into three categories, namely A, B, and C. A Being the most and C the monetarily lowest valuable goods. The conclusion from this was that goods in category A should be monitored and handled with more care than goods in category C.
Why do I need an ‘academic’ formula for this? Every time I read something from business studies, it seems to be more of an overformalization of common sense, wrapped into a bunch of technical terms. I don’t see a real value coming from this.
At the same time people are paid and employed full time to torture their brain about things like these, which then inject this overtheorization into students because it makes them more academic and more intelligent. In reality, things like business plans, which seem to be a must from the theoretical viewpoint, rarely work out. In fact, they hinder success. Turns doers into talkers, because it’s safer, when in reality just adapting to circumstances would be the way to go.
The same in IT. I see the personal preference of programming in one language against the other. However, I don’t see the value of wrapping a bunch of simple functions into abstract encapsulations, like objects, which in reality only make the result less maintainable, less understandable, and more prone to errors. This too stems from overthinking about a bunch of design patterns that spread in so called ‘best practices’ and the introductory lectures that only taught one way to do things, which of course is the right way, because there’s only one after all.
Sticking to the simple model of just writing a bunch of functions, which pragmatically just do what they are supposed to, improving as I need to, and keeping myself from optimizing too early. This gets the stuff done.
Let’s be honest. The ones having to deal with the result, whether it’s the customer, the patient, or whatever, don’t care about how it’s done. They care that it gets done; they care that they get what was promised to them.
Things like intellectually bred academic assumptions, models, and best practices are put on a pedestal, and while not absolutely and generally worthless, they’re highly overvalued.
The true things worth optimizing show themselves when you encounter them giving in under pressure, the things that make everyday tasks painful. The things that have a high impact. Sticking to optimizing from the get-go is a waste of effort, especially if they aren’t a problem. However, you won’t see how it works out in reality if what you are doing only lives on paper with a limited simulation in your head. The world is too complex to see everything play out beforehand.
Real existing things have real impact; ivory tower or pseudo-intellectual crusades of the only right way to do it don’t represent reality. Identifying the challenges in actual action and acting on them is the real value that brings progress.