Friday, December 18, 2015

Troubleshooting checklist

Anybody, who is facing a necessity to troubleshoot, hopes for a miracle. 

For something like closing your eyes and seeing the problem just solving itself without much fuss or explanation, when you open them. We all know this feeling. We all know it almost never works this way, because there is no such a thing as a miracle. 

But there are causes and effects instead. And some brain energy is required to make sense of what you see and to get out of the entanglement. And that brain energy is something that is taken for granted but is not that available.

Those little gray cells

Brainwork is something we think is always there and always will be. You probably no longer believe that storks bring children[1], but for some reason you are sure that your brain is a kind of perpetuum mobile which functions under any condition and knows nothing about sabotage.

That's a lie. It does. And a good (really boring but really good) book[2] by Daniel Kahnneman reminds you a good number of times that the rational, non-automatic, weighing part of your mind is lazy (which is where Kahneman ends and general phycology begins) and being lazy means that your resource is far from enough.