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Comment by Konnstann | Hacker News Reader

Working with limited information means making decisions that might turn out to be bad ones down the line. I agree with your statement, but the opportunity cost of figuring out the exact right problem to solve is inaction, and inaction is often worse than making a poorly-informed judgement.

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> but the opportunity cost of figuring out the exact right problem to solve is inaction, and inaction is often worse than making a poorly-informed judgement.

That reminds me a lot of the days when managers did not want to do proper code testing and coverage because without that they could ship more code. Defining the problem upfront and doing rapid iteration not just on the solution but also problem definition is nowadays more important and effective than just shipping.

Definitely a legitimate consideration. There's always a balance between exploring and exploiting, with an equilibrium point somewhere. My experience is biased by many situations where exploration was unduly limited.

> exploration was unduly limited.

Or was just not done in good faith. Which is why having a culture of openness and honesty and acceptance of failure (to an extent) is important to building an effective engineering culture.

Agreed, and in the author's instance that makes sense but generalizing the problems faced in a specific region that is known for not-so-great government to engineering as a whole is ignoring a lot of context to decision-making, good or bad.

> with an equilibrium point somewhere

The problem is, due to limited information, it is impossible to know where this equilibrium point is. You still have to just make your best guess.

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