I'm going to call it; A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission

https://twitter.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1910314718998192537

by Maro • 1 year ago

4 1 1 year ago

twitter.com

Maro• 1 year ago

Full text from the tweet:

I'm going to call it right now. A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission.

By design.

As part of the plan.

Don't get upset. I'm not saying SpaceX plans to fail. I'm pointing out that SpaceX has taken an ultraimportant principle from software engineering, and realized it applies to all engineering.

Feedback beats planning.

And that, you see, is why SpaceX doesn't do things the NASA way. The NASA way was to gold-plate everything, plan and test and plan and test, and generate mountains of paper detailing every contingency, with every scenario prepared for.

SpaceX just shrugs, says "it's unmanned", and sends it.

Half the time it blows up. That's the whole point. They don't actually want it to blow up, of course, but they're anticipating that it might.

That possibility is part of the plan. Because one rocket blowing up, or crashing, in an actual end-to-end test, beats many, many man-years of planning and plotting.

The key realization here is that knowledge only comes from empirical observation. Everything else is just speculative.

The sooner you get into a feedback loop, and the faster you run it, the more iterations you can do in less time. This means, while others are planning and speculating, you actually learn something.

Relevant data is the most precious thing in the universe. And it's worth blowing up any number of rockets to get it.

Because rockets are just stuff. They're just made of stuff. And you can always get more stuff.

You can never get more time.

So expect to see a lot of things go wrong on this, and other SpaceX missions. Anticipate it. Accept it when it happens. Doesn't mean the dream of the stars is dead.

It just means we're doing it cowboy style.

This is a valuable lesson for our own lives. If there's something you want to do, something you want to try, some goal you have, it's easy to dip a toe in the water, test the temperature, and plan. A lot.

Planning makes us feel good if we're afraid. Because it provides us with the illusion of security. Never mind that we don't know which scenarios are actually going to happen, never mind that we're planning for the wrong thing, planning makes us feel safe. And if we're nervous, we can plan forever.

But the difference between the expert and the novice isn't theory or intelligence or plans. It's relevant domain knowledge. Gathered from empirical observation.

So the trick is to get into that feedback loop as soon as possible, and run it as fast as possible. Give yourself the most possible opportunities to learn, per unit time.

We only learn while we are moving.

I'm going to call it; A lot of stuff is going to break on this mission

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