Finding your own bugs
Finding bugs in your software is relatively easy (yes, some companies definitely struggle with that, but it’s still easy compared to other things in life). But how to find bugs in your own thinking? It’s especially difficult when you’re someone who’s never wrong. Ok, what I meant to say, it’s especially difficult to detect your own fallacy when you’re only slightly off, not so much for it to be obvious, but enough to push you off track.
If you’re used to trusting your reasoning and thinking process, it may be hard to even stumble upon the fact that you’re going astray until it’s too late.
If you have a group of close friends who you frequently hang out with (I’m sure all of us do, right?), chances are that they notice your mistake. And chances are that they will not point it out to you, to avoid hurting your feelings, because they’re nice people like that. Or, perhaps your friends regularly point out your faults and mistakes, even when it doesn’t matter. They do it so frequently, that you’ve learned to ignore it.
So what can be done? The first step is obviously being prepared to accept that you may be wrong, no matter how impossible it seems. Since you’ve read this far, let’s assume we’re all past that step (we all are, aren’t we? Right? Seriously, let’s move on).
The only reliable way to detect bugs in one’s thinking that I found, is to maintain a very diverse network of people that you regularly talk to. They’re your testers, they provide the necessary feedback loops. Widely understood diversity is very important here — you want a lot of backgrounds, lot of cultures, lot of different personal stories and preferences.
This is different than your circle of friends, and you may not even like all these people. You may also not be entirely comfortable with the values that some of them represent — in fact, that’s a good sign, that’s how you know your network is diverse enough. I’m emphasizing the diversity, because it not only trains you to consider and accept different points of view, but also simply increases the coverage of your thought-tests.
All of this sounds easy, but it may not be so if you’re more on the introvert side, like me. I tend to form fewer relationships, and when I do, I tend to invest in them a lot. This means that maintaining a network that’s big enough to also be diverse is straight out draining. And so I struggle, suffering for the greater good of getting awesome.
I wish there was another reliable way to detect faults in my thought process. I would love to have a software tool that does this, do you know if one exists? Or perhaps you know some other tricks to self-debug your way of thinking? I’m eagerly awaiting your comments.
Originally published at bytesandsenses.wordpress.com
