If I get GP's argument, a more appropriate analogy would be that some life jackets are filled with lead and you can't necessarily tell them apart. That is to say, presenting yourself to the external world carries an inherent risk as well as the potential for reward.

But as with leaden life jackets, you can tell them apart. The subset of projects and people that are poison pills can be discerned, so "build the right thing" is more like "don't build the wrong thing, and keep building" where the wrong thing can be avoided the majority of the time.

Which is basically the process of gradient descent, aka learning!

There's a difference between necessary and sufficient.

Your argument is that it is necessary.

My argument is that it is not sufficient.

These are two different arguments.

Dismissing things that are necessary because they aren't sufficient is a recipe for failure.

(Not OP) To me it seems they expanded on it rather than dismissing it:

> Implicit in this argument is that you need to build the right thing and talk to the right people.