The "nirvana fallacy" is definitely one I commonly see on Hacker News. The ease with which people jump from "thing x is imperfect" to "thing x is worthless" is mind-boggling. This is usually coupled with familiarity bias, where the flaws of any existing technology are discounted vs. those of a new technology.
This touches on another thing, which is “Thing X is known to be imperfect, Pat says thing Y is better. Nobody else on the team has tried Y but we have all these aphorisms like ‘no silver bullet’ that lead us to think Y can’t be that good.”
When somebody presents me with a new shiny solution to a hard problem describing it as a silver bullet, I immediately become suspicious. So, it depends a lot on how good Pat says that Y is.
Do these people actually say, “this is a silver bullet” or is that your interpretation? Does this mean is pat undersells you on Y you might be more receptive?
It's not about underselling, it's about showing awareness that there are always tradeoffs. I'm much more receptive when they did their due diligence about those and the risks for the project.
Y is not necessarily better than X, but perhaps you should look to see in case perhaps Y is actually better. (Or maybe in some ways it is better and other ways not so much better. Or maybe it is better for what they are doing but not you.)
Also, sometimes something is, although not perfect, can be improved without breaking or making it too messy, but, sometimes not.
A fallacy I've noticed often in sw engineering, and might fall under the nirvana fallacy definition, is the assumption that there is one best tool for doing things- the one that supports the largest amount of use cases.
An metaphor I like to use is that of the software engineer buying a tank instead of a car: fits more people, drives on all terrain, basically indestructible, and in case an enemy is blocking the road you can always shoot it from the turret. Of course, it's horrendously expensive, wildly impractical, and you have to demolish your garage and rebuild it to fit it in, but hey, that was the best choice.
I dont really take it this way. for me the 'nirvana fallacy' is that if we design a bespoke system, in the limit we will save work and end up with a better product than if we found a tank and a car, welded them together, and fixed them up.
whats not mentioned in the article is the 'never coming up for air' problem. maybe building a custom ruggedized car is worth the time investment - but the problem is that once your people get into that mode they always a new and interesting direction to take it, and never end up installing the seats and the taillights.
i still believe that an 80% implementation of some idealized system generally wins over 'just mash together some stuff to make a demo and we'll deal with the fallout later'...but since no one else does anymore its kind of moot.
>A fallacy I've noticed often in sw engineering, and might fall under the nirvana fallacy definition, is the assumption that there is one best tool for doing things
