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Salemicus comments on Rationality Quotes November 2014 - Less Wrong
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No plan survives contact with the enemy (or reality), but that doesn't mean you can just wing it. Of course you need a specific plan, but you also need the ability to change that plan as needed, in a controlled and sensible way. Realising the problems of advanced planning means you need to spend more time, not less, on working out what you are trying to do.
I'm reminded of Eisenhower:
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
Then why does every modern startup do agile development instead of spending more time on planning?
We do agile development where I work. That doesn't mean we don't plan. On the contrary. Agile development doesn't mean throwing a bunch of developers in a room and telling them "do whatever comes to mind" without any thought to what might come out of the process. It means constantly updating your plans, in an adaptive and iterative way.
Well, probably mostly because it's trendy. But as for why people who choose to do agile development for sensible reasons do so, I suspect it's because doing planning and data collection in such a way that they inform one another has better results than planning in the absence of data or data collection in the absence of a plan.
Why do you ask?
If you ask people to give you a clear alternative of a poltiical system then the only way to give you what you are asking is to give you something that migth work in theory but that's not based on empiric reality.
One of the big problem with Soviet style communism was that a central planner made a plan with wasn't well based on empiric reality.
As a result there are valid reasons for part of todays left to dislike the idea of central planning.