I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.

As a very HN-y analogy: there's a reason programmers don't debug purely by static analysis. They don't just stare at the code. They do step-throughs. They look at logs. They tweak things and see what happens. They experiment and learn from their experimentation. A program is about as controlled and isolated an environment as you will ever have in the real world, and even in that domain, pure analysis is rarely sufficient.

> I'd argue for a third option: don't try to solve it by sitting in your chair. Go out and work on the problem, and see if what you're doing is improving it.

Amen to this. Doing is a strong teacher, sometimes the only teacher.

Mistakes and failure are awesome and underrated.

I've grown a ton as a person from my work, and one of the biggest things I've learned is how easy it is to have confident, empirically-supported, well-argued, and totally wrong opinions. There's no better way to test your views than to bet on them and put them out into the world - even if they don't work, you'll learn something.

Of course, that can go too far in the other direction, because empirical results are often driven by factors outside your control too. So you do need to be doing analysis and not just looking at results. But analysis alone doesn't get you there, even if you're extraordinarily brilliant (and, statistically, you probably aren't).

A mentor put it this way to me: you can't steer a stationary ship. The ship has to be moving for the rudder to work, and therefore it's better to be heading in the wrong direction (where you can turn around once you figure that out) than to be sitting still, doing nothing.

This is a really powerful framing. Thank you for posting it. Not clinging to outcomes seems to help in every case, also.

Or you just can fight that tendency, fight this “solutionism” worldview, not everything is solvable, things may not turn out all right, but that’s ok, too. I.e. one should embrace the fatalism, the “it is what it is” worldview.

Yup, but what I see so often happening is that people will look at the situation and automatically affix responsibility to whatever side has the most power, they obviously are being derelict in not working hard enough to solve the problem. Any attempt to point out other factors is treated as supporting the abuse by the side with the power. They have "solved" it by finding someone to blame.