---
title: Perfectionism
#description: 
#feed_description: 
author: Issa Rice
creation_date: 2015-08-04
last_major_revision_date: 2015-08-04
language: English
# Possible values are "notes", "draft", "in progress", and
# "mostly finished"
status: notes
# Possible values are "certain", "highly likely", "likely", "possible",
# "unlikely", "highly unlikely", "remote", "impossible", "fiction", and
# "emotional"
#belief: possible
# accepts "CC0", "CC-BY", or "CC-BY-SA"
license: CC-BY
tags: longnow, long-term thinking, content creation
#aliases: 
---

Some vaguely related threads about perfectionism, short term vs long term, etc.

- math psets: "easy to do, hard to write up"
- computer security; user [solipsist](http://lesswrong.com/user/solipsist/overview/) [comments](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/mi3/open_thread_jul_20_jul_26_2015/cljq):

    > The market doesn't support secure software. The expensive part
    > isn't writing the software -- it's inspecting for defects
    > meticulously until you become confident enough that defects which
    > remain are sufficiently rare. If a firm were to go though the
    > expense of producing highly secure software, how could they
    > credibly demonstrate to customers the absence of bugs? It's a
    > market for lemons.

- writing poetry: sum of creativity on reddit

    > maybe reddit’s creativity sum is greater than anything that can be
    > produced by a single human being. but yet reddit can’t make it
    > coherent, it can’t polish it. but a poet can polish their work
    > many times over. it’s the same as in programming, writing the YC
    > post, doing math psets, etc etc etc.
    > 
    > ppl criticize perfectionism, but polishing has a quality of its
    > own

- writing yc post
- Brian Tomasik in [Is It Better to Blog or Formally Publish? | Essays on Reducing Suffering](http://reducing-suffering.org/is-it-better-to-blog-or-formally-publish/):

    > Currently I incline against publishing in academia most of the
    > time, since I find that it takes a lot of effort to write papers
    > in the style that a journal demands, while the payoff from having
    > a journal publication isn't necessarily that big unless you're
    > trying to get tenure. However, if you can get funding by being a
    > grad student, the cost-benefit calculation changes and may make
    > academic publishing a good idea.

- programming: "over-engineering" something; and of course Facebook's famous "move fast and break things; if you're not breaking things you're not moving fast enough" etc.^[Though Zuckerberg has shifted Facebook away from that now.]
- 4chan -- HN's take on php code

    [treehau5](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=treehau5):

    > I mean,
    > 
    > Yes I hate PHP more than the next guy,
    > 
    > Yes this code is terrible,
    > 
    > But you know what? I can read it, and follow along. And that's
    > actually more to say than other "beautiful" code that was
    > obfuscated behind 3 or 4 levels of unnecessary levels of
    > abstraction or indirection.

    [dewey](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dewey):

    >  And yet, despite the horrible code, it's still powering an Alexa
    >  Top 500 page without any huge problems I've heard of. 

    [TheAceOfHearts](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=TheAceOfHearts):

    >  I think this just goes to show that you can have a lot of
    >  popularity even if your code is just sorta glued together.

    - of course, the opposite is [suckless's philosophy](http://suckless.org/philosophy)

- [Your Coding Philosophies are Irrelevant](http://prog21.dadgum.com/142.html)
- 80-20 rule
- semantic web; impatience
- same with semantic web: the market won’t accept it because people don’t wanna put in the work
- same with archiving things