The way I see it, Malcolm Gladwell and David Heinemeier Hansson are talking about the same thing recently. Malcolm calls it “heuristics” and describes a wonderful heuristic for creating a great NBA team – or at least one better than the Knicks are this year (14-43 so far this season). David calls it “convention over configuration” (37MB mp3 file) and has implemented it in Ruby on Rails.
Gladwell’s claim is that a simple heuristic — only draft veterans of UConn and Duke championship teams — gets him a lot closer to the goal of an NBA championship team than some more analytical (and potentially error-prone) methods of choosing players.
The basic idea is that there is the “right” way to do something – the way that you can prove is correct analytically, or that clearly requires expertise, or that’s the way we’ve always done it. And there is another way, that’s not “correct” but that actually works as well, and sometimes better, than the “right” way.
Gladwell links to an article “Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart” by Peter M. Todd and Gerd Gigerenzer that puts a quantitative framework around the power of simple heuristics.
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