“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.
The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’

To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”

If failure is cheap or easy to recover from, then optimize for efficiency. The web developer building a puppy photo-sharing app can optimize for high efficiency at the cost of robustness – hence the startup adage to “move fast and break things.” The cost of making a mistake is cheap. No one freaks out if their puppy photo won’t load for an hour.

If failure is costly and hard to recover from, then robustness is more important. The nuclear power plant engineer is in the precisely opposite position. Nuclear engineers do not “move fast and break things” in the name of efficiency. They move at slothlike speed and quintuple check everything. The impact of making a mistake is catastrophic hence the saying “measure twice, cut once.”

The fourth backup generator is going to be idle 99.9999% of the time. In that sense, having it around is very “inefficient”, but if it gets used only once in a millennium to prevent a catastrophic meltdown, then it was money very well spent.

Getting it together mentally in tennis involves the learning of several internal skills:

1) learning how to get the clearest possible picture of your desired outcomes;

2) learning how to trust Self 2 to perform at its best and learn from both successes and failures; and

3) learning to see “nonjudgmentally”—that is, to see what is happening rather than merely noticing how well or how badly it is happening.

This overcomes “trying too hard.” All these skills are subsidiary to the master skill, without which nothing of value is ever achieved: the art of relaxed concentration.

When the Director of the CDC asserts an opinion, she has to optimize for two things - being right, and keeping power. If she doesn't optimize for the second, she gets replaced as CDC Director by someone who does. That means she's trying to solve a harder problem than Zvi [seemingly random internet person] is, and it makes sense that sometimes, despite having more resources than Zvi, she does worse at it.

The way I imagine this is that Zvi reads some papers on whether the coronavirus has airborne transmission, sees the direction they're leaning, and announces on his blog that it probably has airborne transmission.

The Director of the CDC reads those same papers. But some important Senator says that if airborne transmission is announced, important industries in his state will go bankrupt. Citizens Against Lockdowns argues that the CDC already screwed up by stressing the later-proven-not-to-exist fomite-based transmission, ignoring the needs of ordinary people in favor of a bias towards imagining hypothetical transmission mechanisms that never materialize; some sympathetic Congressman tells the director that if she makes that same mistake a second time, she's out. One of the papers saying that airborne transmission is impossible comes from Stanford, and the Director owes the dean of Stanford's epidemiology department a favor for helping gather support for one of her policies once. So the Director puts out a press release saying the evidence is not quite strong enough to say airborne transmission definitely happens, and they'll review it further.

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