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A comment on Attorneys say Elizabeth Holmes isn’t paying them. Parent comment

Re:Attorneys say Elizabeth Holmes isn’t paying them by Traster on Saturday October 05, 2019 @05:28AM (#21164591)
The problem with "Fail fast" as with many of these slogans is that people don't mean them. You can trust me, because my ethos is fail fast, so you know that this project must be good because I wouldn't be working on it if it weren't. It's a virtue signal. You could easily reframe "Fail Fast" as "Give up easily"- and no one thinks that's a really good thing. Similarly "Move fast and break things" could easily be restated as "Don't think about the consequences of your actions".

These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.

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Re:Attorneys say Elizabeth Holmes isn’t paying them by perl4ever on Sunday October 06, 2019 @05:42PM (#21175369)
Most people don't succeed, so in trying to replicate success, the key must be something non-obvious and counter-intuitive.

So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way.

It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.

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