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- URL: https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1478470137552551936
- Author: Jonathan Blow (@Jonathan_Blow)
- Posted: 2022-01-04 20:55:24
Thread
1/ @Jonathan_Blow
Re-doing things, that didn’t come out well enough the first time, is one of the most effective methods of making good things. If you’re working on something new and different, you won’t know in advance what is going to be best. You try some things, and learn what will be good.
2/ @Jonathan_Blow
This feels a little different when distributed across a team, but the basic idea is the same as when it’s just one person working. All the time I remove things I have done before, and replace them with something better, in both programming and design.
3/ @Jonathan_Blow
This does not mean that the initial work was wasted. The initial work was necessary to get to a place where you could see what was better.
4/ @Jonathan_Blow
This process of working on difficult and uncertain things is important. A society that has some people willing to do this is going to be much better off, in the long run, than a society that has no people willing to do these things.
5/ @Jonathan_Blow
It is therefore very destructive to attack people who are trying to run difficult projects, just because things go badly sometimes or the person makes mistakes. We expect things to go badly sometimes; if they don’t, that means the project was easy.
6/ @Jonathan_Blow
If you systematically hound, deride, ridicule, demonize, etc, the people who are trying to do difficult things, you’ll end up only with people who aren’t doing that, and advancement will be curtailed accordingly.
7/ @Jonathan_Blow
This becomes especially dark in the current media environment, where certain people seem to have made a business model out of finding the inevitable flaws in any human being (know anyone perfect? I don’t!) and crafting a story that frames them disingenuously.
8/ @Jonathan_Blow
I would encourage us not to feed this parasitic behavior.
Branches: 2022-01-04-jakehadley-its-particularly-frustrating-when-talking-about, 2022-01-04-AaronInfinitea-perhaps-a-topic-for-your-next-lecture, 2022-01-04-Zaxsin-my-college-writing-teacher-said-almost-every, 2022-01-05-DigPhysics-good-points-that-iterative-improvement-process