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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

Is the example correct?

> Instead of asking how do we increase the adoption of a product or feature? You could instead consider - what are some of things preventing adoption?

Surely to invert the question you'd want to consider how do I deliberately decrease adoption of the product? It might lead to some of the same answers, like make it slower. But also to different ones, like constantly bad-mouth my own product on social media. (Which would indicate a path to adoption is to rigorously rebut criticism using Google Alerts.)

Edit: I think the difference is if I'm only looking for what about my current product prevents adoption, then I've narrowed my scope to looking at aspects of my current product. Whereas if I blue-sky think about ways to make the product bad, that allows a broader range of solutions for making it good.

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Yeah a direct inversion doesn't seem to work. I think you invert the idea but with the premise that you don't want to do it.

So instead of: How do I decrease adoption?

You think: How do I avoid decreasing adoption?

I think this works anyway. Another example:

Goal: Fly to Spain

Question: How do I fly to Spain?

The inverted question should not be "How do I not fly to Spain?" (answer: get put on a flying ban or don't buy a ticket) but "How do I avoid not flying to Spain?" (answer: pick a date and book tickets)

In what situations do the answers to the inverse differ from the original? It seems to me it's just a rewording of the original question with a double negative.

("How do I not not fly to Spain?")

How do I make money? - Get lucky in a Casino.

How do I not lose money? - Don’t gamble.

How do I not not make money? - Take more risks.

A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.

Good point - the 'fly to Spain' example wasn't the best. Running through multiple things in my head.. it seems the most powerful thing is to have a good initial question so the inversion actually helps.

But that isn't really an inversion, more a double negative.

The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?". Your result would be "how do I avoid not keeping my pilots alive?", which is just the original question.

> The example given is "how do I keep my pilots alive?" with the inversion "what could kill my pilots?".

Pretty much that, except in any long-standing industry, it's framed as "what does kill pilots?" and "Lets study the last few decades of pilot mortality data and identify causes". Safety standard improve one Air-crash Investigation at a time.

"The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'" by Sidney Dekker is probably where to start with that field.

I imagine a single negation would increase the solution space so much that it wouldn't be useful anymore. A double negation will change the question format, so our (irrational) minds treat it differently, yet keep the solution space the same.

It might be irrational in some cases, but it also might have to do with the double negation of a statement not being practically equivalent to the statement, as in constructive mathematics.

I have read about mathematician Abraham Wald's operational research for the US on WWII aircraft armor placement. Wald challenged the instincts and conventional wisdom of military commanders who thought that more armor should be added to the places on airplanes that had the most bullet holes upon returning from a mission.

Wald instead flipped it and recommended armor be added to the areas with less or no combat damage on returning airplanes because the shot-up areas were the parts of the plane that COULD withstand damage, since the plane had made it back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald

I agree my example was more a double negative. The way I am thinking though would result in something similar to yours.

Don't invert the question, invert the goal.

If you want to be in Spain, why aren't you there right now?

It seems to me the inversion of "how do I fly to Spain" (goal: "I want to visit Spain") is "what could prevent me from flying to Spain?".

In general, instead of "how do we achieve $X?" the inversion is "what is stopping $X?" or "what would cause $X to fail?".

I think this is like the question of do you want the inverse or the contrapositive? Most likely the second one.

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