For whatever reasons, I’m unusually sensitive to the way we use language.
My current irrational bugbear is the nominalization “learnings.” As in “What were your learnings from that meeting?” I had never heard this five or six years ago, and now it’s everywhere, much to my annoyance. Reader: the nominalization is “lesson.”
On a slightly more profound level, it really grinds my gears when someone asks if you can “just…” do something. “Can’t you just use a relational database?” “Why can’t we just send an email?” “Can’t you just build it?”
Certainly sometimes this is merited. In the sense that the barrier someone faces is mental rather than practical. You might be afraid to hit the button to push new code to production, even though you’ve spent hours and hours vetting it, have a plan B if something goes wrong, and really are in a position to go for it. It really is a question of “just hitting the button.”
In the less positive case, I usually find it’s a misunderstanding of the difficulty involved in what might seem like a simple problem. Or a mismatch in what you’re trying to achieve. Especially when there’s an unequal distribution of power. Say, a manager with less expertise telling one of their team members to “just do” something. Even simple problems are often much more complicated than they may seem.
This thought was inspired by a post from the team at The New York Times. The paper is about to hit a major milestone, publishing its 60,000th issue after being in business for over 150 years. It’s a real accomplishment.
In sharing this upcoming achievement, the team also explained that they prematurely celebrated the last similar milestone at 50,000 issues in the late 1990s. It sounds ridiculous. How do you mess up something so straightforward? Surely you “just increment” the count every day by one, and when you’re going from 49,999 to 50,000, that’s the game.
In reality, way back in May 1898, someone made a small error, and accidentally incremented the count by 500 in a single day. This wasn’t spotted until 1999 — over 100 years after the error! — by an intern, after the paper had already prematurely celebrated the big 50,000 issue milestone.
Celebrating this achievement at the wrong time probably didn’t have any major consequences. But it does illustrate that even something as simple as knowing how many issues of a newspaper you’ve published can have hidden complications.
Another favorite example came in one of my undergraduate math courses.
One of the professor’s previous students had taken an on-campus job in the registrar’s office. The people who make sure you’re registered for courses and have paid all your fees.
While this student was doing her job, someone asked her to figure out how many students there were at the college. Again, the kind of task that seems like it ought to be simple. It also feels like a pretty fundamental question for an educational institution. Not knowing how many students you have at your college is like not knowing how many books you have in a library.
But they didn’t know. In this case, because no one could agree what the definition of a student was. Did a person count toward the total if they were a local high school student taking one course as part of a gifted students program? Did someone count if they were taking academic leave for the current semester, but were enrolled for the previous one in the same academic year?
I can’t remember all the details, but suffice to say figuring out how many students were enrolled was very much not the kind of thing that, in this case, it was possible to “just pull” by, say, building a quick database query. It turned into a multi-month project that wound up drawing in senior administrators.
To some degree, there’s a tradeoff here between quality and speed. For some questions, it really doesn’t matter if you’re off by 500 issues or 100 students. Whether The New York Times had published 50,000 or 50,500 issues in the late 1990s doesn’t really matter if you’re only interested in understanding if the paper has published “a lot” of issues in a vague hand wave-y sense.
If you’re a university applying for grant funding that gives you a set amount of money for each student, suddenly the stakes are a lot higher. You don’t want to undercount and miss out on resources. You don’t want to overcount and unfairly take what’s not yours.
Often this is the subtext we mean when we ask “can’t you just…” about something. That you have a different idea of how “good” something needs to be from the often more expert person doing the work more directly. But people can’t read minds. Far better to communicate that explicitly and check your priors if that’s what’s going on. Getting at this why will help the other person understand what’s going on more broadly, or could help you understand that perhaps you didn’t appreciate the depths and tradeoffs of a given situation.
What might look simple often isn’t. As I’ve written before, getting something down to its essence — making it simple — often requires far more work than doing a sloppy job or being verbose. It’s important to keep that in mind. Problems that might seem superficially simple, say, knowing how many students you have at your school, can have hidden depths.
Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.