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SufficientButNotNecessary

See also: NecessaryButNotSufficient

A man is sitting on the bench in the park, tearing newspaper into strips and tossing them away.

A second man come up and asks, "What are you doing?"

First man replies, "Keeping the elephants away."

Second man says, "But there are no elephants around here!"

First man, "See? It's working!"

That's SufficientButNotNecessary.

I think that a long period of success breeds these superstitions/rituals. Like keeping the elephants away they seem harmless until the situation changes, then, however, no matter how assiduously they are used, they no longer keep the elephants (competition, trouble, etc.) away.

• herbal cures for cancer.
• lucky socks.
• investing in Dot Coms.

--BobLee 2002-11-21

Very nice Bob!

I hang out with Jim (and I have a masters degree in Mathematics) so I think about NecessaryButNotSufficient all the time. I hardly ever give thoughts to SufficientButNotNecessary.

I have noticed that many procedures (like recipes) tend to develop lots of cruft and extra baggage as each person who uses the instructions adds his 'secret ingredient' and almost none of these extra steps are necessary. The hard part is to remove the necessary steps without touching the steps who's results are subtle or are for "risk mitigation". Since these the output of these steps is hard to observe it would be easy to remove the steps and suffer a loss in quality.

Several times at AYE I heard Jerry state that one should always be looking for processes to remove. One should not add new processes without removing older ones.

KenEstes 2002.11.21

Nice, both comments. There's a variation on the cruft problem when a little extra touch seems meaningless because the folks doing the recipe don't know how to do it right. A required but content-free meeting in somebody's development process qualifies. Think of the all too common non-review review meetings.

So a refinement to dealing with cruft is to either get rid of it, or make it meaningful. Merely saying you are doing something like a review isn't sufficient for it to have an effect. There's some skill required as well.

- JimBullock 2002.11.21