Hacker News Reader

Comment by Yoric | Hacker News Reader

> I'm so astonished that we are so careful not to overthink, to the point we accept "you're overthinking it" as a valid excuse to disregard rare risks.

Very good point.

> But we don't have the same cultural concern against underthinking. I have never heard someone telling their employee or friend "you're underthinking this". Surely overthinking is bad, but when underthinking can be severely dangerous, it's easy to see why some people overthink.

I believe that it's largely a cultural thing.

For instance, in French companies, US Americans definitely have the reputation of underthinking things (which US employees feel is "being productive"). Reciprocally, in US companies, the French have a reputation for overthinking them (which French employees feel is "assessing risks").

One more reason for which balancing cultures (and backgrounds, etc) is actually really important for the future of a company: we all have different blind spots.

View on HN

> we all have different blind spots.

I'm not going to dabble in your cultural representations because I think they're a bit dangerous. I will say that maintaining the idea that we have blind spots is good, overaddressing this is usually called "hand wringing" and is equally prohibitive. To me, it's about having a mix of the two. Think about things critically, but accept that you are not in total control of the world and that any good solution takes iteration and learning.

In America, if there's no law against it you can do it.

In France, if there's no law allowing it, you can't do it.

Would you care to give a few examples? Where something was forbidden _without any law_ and then later allowed _with a law_?

Well there are so many rules and official norms (approx. 400,000) and exceptions about pretty much anything in France that this is pretty accurate... Just look up the rules of the road regarding phone calls while driving for examples and see how it has evolved over time: specifically holding the phone was forbidden but using headphones were explicitly allowed until the latter also got banned by another law a few years back. Now to have calls we must put our phones on speakers (but not too loud) and use both hands for driving, effectively forbidding us to give any calls while driving all that without explicitly saying so.

It's hardly enforceable, but wait until you encounter a zealous police agent that's been tasked to give a certain amount of tickets

What you said about France is absolutely not true.

Article V of the French constitution:

> The law has the right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Anything which is not forbidden by the law cannot be impeded, and no one can be constrained to do what it does not order.

Given that the US constitution was greatly influenced by the French one, and given France's influence and substantial aid in helping to establish the USA as an independent country it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could believe this, unless they were completely unaware of both French and American history and culture.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com