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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, sometimes people are able to solve a hard problem simply because they weren't tainted into believing it's impossible. [1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig#Mathematical_st...

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The George Dantzig case actually isn't a counter-anecdote to the XKCD observation, because Dantzig was already a graduate student in a phd program at a top statistics department when he solved those problems.

XKCD isn't criticizing the positive mindset of naive-but-gifted researchers; it's criticizing the attitude of experts in one field that their expertise necessarily gives them unique and powerful insights into solving problems in another field.

Perhaps a better counter-anecdote would be all of the mathematicians in the 1950s - 1980s who solved hard program design problems with little or no experience actually programming computers. That really was a counter-example to the XKCD mentality: a bit of mathematics was far more useful than knowing the instruction set of the latest IBM mainframe...

i think the trick is not worrying about if its impossible. Trick is just to enjoy working on the problem and not worry about the result because you are young and think you are immortal. once you have to guess on the total project cost and opportunity cost, you have lost already. Its permission to fail that you need.

> sometimes

that is, "not at all in the usual case"

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