> Then I realised that "I don't want the details" wasn't being dismissive. The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".
Something about this feels wrong:
- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
- If you don't trust them completely, how can you know if "what happens next" is appropriate without knowing the details?
Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that leadership doesn't need to have their feet on the ground?
The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
It's not just about trust. It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done. That's what good management does, it's just rare to see in low-trust organizations that treat everyone like a cog to be micromanaged because no one trusts anyone to get shit done of their own accord for whatever reason.
> These two statements are at odds. You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more.
But doesn't that same logic apply to whether they need to know the details?
No. Leaderships job in this context is to set expectations of what happens next and to drive the team towards a solution that meets those expectations. No amount of trust magically makes that expectation materialize or for it to be met.
Leadership doesn't need to know what happened to set this expectation and then trust their team - who already know the details - to figure out how to meet what's expected.
Perhaps my favorite quote ever about leadership is that it's about holding a vision long enough for others to realize it for themselves, but you can't do that if you dictate and micromanage.
So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying there's literally no reason for a leader to need to know the details ever unless they don't trust the people implementing the plan. I don't agree with that at all.
Leaders have the option of trusting subordinates, then operating at a higher level. However part of the job of a leader is to decide who to trust, with what. And why.
Sometimes that means, "Trust, but verify." The leader will spot check randomly to see that the whole is good.
Often, as here, that means, "Trust in some things, but not others." The leader in this case trusted the technical person to produce an accurate description of what happened. But didn't trust that same person to arrive at a solution that met the business of having a similar disaster not happen the next time.
But rather than undermine the tech person with, "I don't trust you to meet the business need," the leader communicated it with, "I trust you on the technical details, but here is the expectation for what you need to produce."
The statement I initially responded to was "You first assuming that lack of trust would be the only reason he needs to know what happens next, then go on to outline another reason he and the larger organization would both benefit from knowing more". I pointed out that the same logic seems like it would apply to the idea that there might be other reasons why a leader might need to know the details. They said "no", and then a bunch of other stuff that you seem to think that I'm not reading. I'm reading it, and I'm reading what you said to add onto their comment, I just don't understand how you can claim their answer of "no" to my question doesn't mean "no" to the restatement of my question.
Leaders should not need to know every single detail (ie how this incident happens, or all the tiny process changes that are happening toward their visions). That is different than knowing nothing in detailed.
The baseline expectation in the original post also applies to the SVP: he knew enough to know that things aren't unreasonable to start with, this expectation might not apply to all companies.
The top-level comment that started this discussion was mentioning that a "leader" said "I don't need to know the details" but that they wanted to know what comes next. The comment I responded to claimed that there are valid reasons to need to know what comes next that don't stem from a lack of trust. I asked whether the same logic should apply to wanting to know the details (since to me it seems pretty reasonable that it should). The response said "no".
It seems like you're trying to rebut my argument by presenting my argument as being against a less strong version of the original claim rather than understanding it as being literally just a counterargument to the specific version of the claim I thought was too strong.
An analogy that might make more sense is horizontal scalability vs. vertical scalability. A leader's ability to understand all the details of the proposal brought to them by the team inherently caps the organization's ability to scale up.
Offloading the detail onto the team allows the org to scale higher by allowing the leader to bring more teams/problems into the mix. But it also introduces the complexity of keeping those teams in close enough alignment that the overall effect is still positive.
This is by no means guaranteed to be positive, and there's a lot of details to get right for leadership in making this work. But they are different details than what each individual team was bringing to leadership.
Abstractions are helpful, in business management as much as in systems architecture.
You, and this entire thread is missing the point. Nobody is wrong but, the point being missed is that "leaders" isn't one thing.. there are leaders at every height of the organizations hierarchy and even to the sides. As a basic example, do you mean the immediate manager? their manager? their manager? The CTO? Each operates at ever more abstract level of detail.
What do you think knowing the details will do for the person in the leadership position? It doesn't change what needs to be done, it doesn't change what has been done, all it usually does it put a monkey on the leaders back that's best kept with the team that created it.
Worse it invites bike shedding most of the time, where folks sit in a room nitpicking pointless details that's cathartic for the people in charge, but once again, doesn't actually do anything productive.
> It's about knowing what your team is up to so you can provide them the resources necessary while also working to remove any obstacles in their way so they can get shit done.
That makes sense - I don't know if that's what the blog post was implying though. Ironically, this blog post could probably benefit from a few more details about what the meeting was supposed to achieve :)
> I believe you. I don’t need the details. Tell me what we're changing.
Yeah, for me in these situations it’s often about messaging to stakeholders, and so management in general feels like the problem has been addressed. I do think there’s one important thing missing from the final statement of the post, that he sort of covered briefly when talking about too much process, and that is what is the tradeoff/cost of implementing the change we’re making. Engineering is fundamentally about tradeoffs, and any significant proposed change requires some tradeoff and all too often I see management not asking about this explicitly. I’ve had enough once in a blue moon errors have retros, where the team decided it made no sense to make changes, and others, where the cost was high enough it was worth increasing workflow headaches. I think these tradeoffs being explicit are important at the director and above level, since there are potential real impacts to the team, and that is the level to deal with morale or headcount pressures due to changes to processes.
The meeting was about the SVP teaching the team that incidents happen, what's important is to prevent the same issue from occuring again.
The fact the author had never been in a call with the SVP implies incidents that happened before were explained in details, without much process change.
We are arguing because there is an IT maturity line that goes from chaos to corporate and the more like a startup the more it will be like chaos (by design because maturity is too restrictive). So horses for courses. But as the team grows the same lessons get learned everywhere you bring in ex-bigco to implement changes to be more mature. That will include incident management process that will make this situaton routine and not worth blogging about. Probably in a mature process leaders already read the summary and or postmortem if they felt they needed to.
A lot of times, people just need a gentle nudge, or an official blessing from an authority figure, to go ahead and make the change that is necessary. You can tell people to manage up, to fully own their work and their process, etc. But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line. A worker on the assembly line might know the best way to make the line run more smoothly but it’s easy to think that’s “not my job” or “above my pay grade”. Sometimes all that’s needed is to tell them, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”
Getting that to happen more automatically is one way out of this situation, but that tends to cause problems of its own, with blurry lines of responsibility and authority. So it works best with relatively flat organization structures, which aren’t used much in large organizations.
> But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line.
It's conditioning. In all organizations above a certain size (> 100 people), stepping out of line receives an official reprimand. Someone always complains. Receive enough reprimands and the person is terminated. People learn to stay in line because they've been punished whenever they step out of it.
Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.
The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.
The legend of Richard Montañez and inventing Flaming Hot Cheetos itself is not supported by facts, but the underlying story of someone low level who jumped the chain of command and contacted executives at the company seems to hold up. Which means there's at least one organization out there for which it's true.
The best leaders know what they need to pay attention to. You cannot know everything. You can know any one thing (or perhaps several), but there are more things to know than you will have time to learn in your lifetime. The question is what is important for you to know, and what you leave to somebody else.
You will have to trust someone will figure out the details and come up with a reasonable solution. Sometimes you need to know that solution, sometimes in detail, sometimes just enough to know that they solved it. Sometimes you are the person who needs to figure out the details and make the solution. Knowing which you are is important.
In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
I think its entirely contextual as to what the size of the org is and the scope of the projects. At a startup an "executive" or VP would legitimately be able to be working side by side with everyone else, or hearing about the ground level operations, but just by nature of the role being SVP I imagine this is a large enough company that this is no longer the case. At a certain point that becomes somebody else's job that is much closer to the team at hand.
The role entirely morphs and their job becomes to enable teams, get blockers out of the way, fast track or assist things like permissions/processes, shoot down ideas that legitimately don't add business value or are not worth wasting existing engineering effort on.
And I imagine in this scenario the point wasn't for the executive to literally hear what happens next, it was to ensure the proper steps are being taken and make sure "somebody" is handling the what happens next part of things, and so they can report up through the chain or delegate tasks for exactly that "what happens next" task.
> In a large enough organization it is simply impossible for executives to be on the ground floor with everyone else. And not only is it impossible, it is essentially a waste of their time. They could maybe be maximally involved in only a few projects at a time.
This is a very strong argument that no organization should be allowed to get that big.
I get the sentiment, but this is the reason we have airplanes, MRI machines, and computers that fit in our pockets. Advanced technology simply isn't possible in an economy of only ~100 person organizations. And I say this as someone with a deep sense of unease with modernity and all of the diseases of civilization. We somehow have managed to create systems that support literally billions of humans and allow many of them to have a quality of life undreamed of even a few hundred years ago. I dislike big orgs as much as they next guy but we need to understand why they exist if we want to criticize and reform them.
Big organizations don't enable greater technological progress, which is why companies do 98% of their innovation before they get huge, and get bad at innovating once they are.
Big organizations enable scaling and associated economies of scale, so it's possible for Apple to sell millions of iPhones cheaper than if they were a smaller company. I don't think that tradeoff is worth it for any individual consumer (pay a little less to be much more abused by the company), and I don't think it's worth it for society.
Most of the big corporations in America aren't providing things as useful as MRI machines, they're providing net negative garbage like social media and advertising. Big corporations like United Healthcare Group are inflating the cost of medical care rather than providing economies of scale and reduced cost for their clients.
The US desperately needs to bring back antitrust and start breaking these massive companies into much smaller pieces.
You can build everything in the world with organizations at that size cooperating, but a society that values profit extraction will never organize itself in this manner. The problem isn't org size, it's profit motive.
Ironically, those same systems that enabled high QoL are also the ones involved in killing us, whether that's carcinogens everywhere, climate change, resistant bacteria, or even just plain old nukes (or soon drone swarms).
I wouldn't be alive if not for advanced medicine, but if the structures that saved my life are the same ones that constitute our own Great Filter, my life was most definitely not worth the trade. There are too many other people I love to think that.
There may be something common across many of the ground floor parts, such that even just knowing what's going on in a fraction of them, they are much further in their vibe-calibration of what ground floor is like than if they know zero.
You can trust someone to know the details and reasons for why something happened, and still want to provide the specific direction of "what are you doing to make sure it doesn't happen again". The organizational default is often to explain a fault (or worse, focus on blame) without specifically working to find a process improvement to prevent it from happening again.
Plan is the key here. In reality the SVP is hoping that they can make the decision to go with your solution.
Q: What are you going to do about missing this bug?
A1: "I'm going emphasize "BE" in Hamlets' "to BE or not to BE". - You should be fired for this, but that is not the planned decision.
A2: "I'm going to spend $$$$ on some tool". - This tool might solve the problem, but the budget doesn't allow for it and you should know that: I'm forced to make the decision to override you but I didn't plan on making that decision.
A3: "I'm going to [summarize something reasonable]" - good, you are doing what I expected.
Note that A3 doesn't have to work, it just has to be reasonable. If it works great, if not I will ask again next time and I expect you have different answer. Not working at all better be rare though since each not working loses confidence, but fortunately this is rare. However often working is sometimes all you can get (the next bug might be unrelated - no single answer could solve both). The idea is we repeat this for each bug until the rate of missed bugs is acceptably low.
“Trust” is usually bounded. I trust my elementary aged son to get dressed for school without supervision. That doesn’t mean I trust him to start a campfire without supervision. A chef might trust that their new employee is a hard worker and well intentioned. That doesn’t mean they also trust them to create and serve original dishes.
Here you are recasting “I trust that, despite the bad outcome, everyone’s actions here were reasonable” as “I trust that you are going to solve this fully without my guidance”. The fact that the word “trust” appears in both of these statements does not make them equivalent. Trusting that people are capable and well intentioned does not mean trusting that they will accomplish the same thing without you.
I don't read the article this way. It's pretty sane for an exec to draw a line where the team's autonomy meets leadership's responsibility for structure and incentives around which said team needs to organize.
"You did the right things and met the goals we set, but we hit a problem and we all agree it shouldn't happen again. Let's talk about what needs to change to address this."
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
There are many reasons an executive needs to know what’s happening even if they’ve delegated the decision making authority.
Nobody can go to their boss and say “I don’t know what’s being done. I let so-and-so handle everything and they’ll figure it out”. Everyone has to know the big things that are happening.
Second, this is the step where the manager surveys the next steps for potential blockers or opportunities to accelerate. Maybe they notice that the plan could benefit from someone else’s help and they ask that person to contribute.
There’s a lot of overthinking happening in this thread. The “I don’t need to know the details” isn’t a literal statement that covers all details. It’s a way of saying “Skip forward to the part I need to hear about”.
Asking what the OP was going to change is not an automatic nod of approval for his approach. I’ve been part of some large interventions spanning multiple quarters, that started from a simple conversation with an exec just like this. There are downstream effects to these decisions that affect many stakeholders and departments - so they cannot be made in a vacuum or delegated completely (I trust you, go ahead and fix whatever). Depends on the severity and scope of the issue of course. A simple deployment gone wrong is different from a fundamental issue with the architecture that is straining progress.
As an example, a major rehaul of a core system could push back product (new feature dev) timelines, that can affect customers and their releases, bottomline of the company, reputation, tax repercussions, if it’s an American public company then it’ll affect SOX compliance & audits, could lead to spicy investor/analyst conference calls, and so on.
First of all, he didn't say the executive "trusted them completely". Those are your words.
He said "The executive assumed that we were competent, and was saying "I already believe you. Now let's talk about what happens next".".
That can be true even if they don't trust them completely. Let's say he trusted them 80% and not 100%. Isn't that pretty much quite trusting anyway?
Besides, the executive can trust them even 100%, but still want them to give him the general picture. Among other things, it's his job to know and be able to report when asked.
The VP also needs to know if the fix will require some sort of resource reallocation, or if the timeline is long so they can deal with the other stakeholders, or whatever. These are all forward looking things that the details influence but the details aren't what matter.
> The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details. I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
If execs demand a big change every time something goes wrong, they will demoralize everyone working for them, and probably waste a lot of money.
Most of the time, operational failures are either the result of a new feature being sent off without enough testing, or a dozen small failures lining up to remove resilience. Big changes without well-thought out plans primarily serve to stoke executive egos.
> If I have a handle on things from bottom-up to top-down, I don't need them to rehash weed-level technical and specific details.
I should have been clearer.
When I said that good leaders pay attention to things from the bottom-up, that doesn't mean they always know everything needed for any discussion. It just means they are able and keen to understand the low-level details when they matter, because they routinely look at such details in the projects that they're involved in.
Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
> I need them to tell me what we're going to change, and it needs to be a BIG systemic change, not minutiae, which is where many engineers thrive.
How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
> Of course it's possible that this story is just told badly and the SVP already knew the technical details, in which case the blog post is a bit misleading.
I don't think it's necessarily misleading; it's just reminding folks that senior leaders have a different perspective than those below them and tailoring your message to the audience is important.
In this case of this, it was a reminder that while it's easy to believe the SVP is being dismissive, that's not the case at all. Instead, they want systems-oriented decisioning, not detail-oriented.
If anything, this was the SVP helping to grow the leaders under him by forcing them to think at the levels required to interact w/the rest of the organization.
> How can you know if their "big change" is appropriate and good without knowing the details of the problem the change is addressing?
I'm a Senior Director leading three teams of engineering and science resources. I hired smart and capable people. Why should I, as a SrD be a technical bottleneck?
> How can one know if the engineers' proposed "BIG systemic change" is appropriate and complete, without knowing the details of the problem it is addressing?
That’s the trust thing. Maybe the SVP trusts the people in his organization are capable of making the appropriate change without his supervision and what he’s doing is coaching them on how to do an incident postmortem properly.
Of course as you called out, the SVP might already have all the necessary details to do more than that. But simply pushing people in the right direction is a big piece of leadership’s job, at least when they have people they trust.
If I trust you know what happened, and trust you to know what to do so it doesn’t happen again, why do I need to know? And how will I know (and endorse) your decision if I don’t know what happened?
> - If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
You might need to know timescales so that you can inform upwards/outwards/other. You might need to make sure other resources that might be necessary are available. The planned "what next" and the proposed timescales might have impacts elsewhere that they haven't realised (and maybe even until now had no reason to be aware of). If they tell you the what next and there are no such complications, then they can carry on, otherwise there might need to be some changes to the plan or changes to other plans to allow time/resources to be available for this plan or just to stop potential near future conflicts.
They trust your ability to do a root cause analysis. They don’t trust that you feel empowered to do anything about it, so they are verifying that you actually do.
One reason is prioritization. It’s enough to know what the effects of the failure were, the likely cost of what needs to change, and what areas and processes the changes will affect, to decide if and when this should happen.
Leadership still needs to understand these aspects on a conceptual, topical, and cost level to decide on the resource allocation (including time and schedule). They don’t need to understand the technical details, unless they are a technical leader with higher relevant technical competence than their reports.
Also, not every IC or EM has the same skills and experience. There may be certain categories of work that you can be 100% hands-off and trust them to just do it, and others where you really need to understand bottom-up. Part of being an eng leader is to know when to insert yourself and when to "trust the process".
That’s not even true though, leadership is coordination, even if you trust someone else to do the right thing wrt their own problems that still may be globally suboptimal wrt the goals of the overall team / project.
Not wanting to know the details is a red flag. Sometimes the process of expressing the details can reveal things that were unknown by one or both parties, leading to improved processes. The only acceptable exception would be "Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."
The details are sometimes important and sometimes irrelevant. If you insist on skipping them all the time, you will often be right, but when the day comes that you are wrong, your unwillingness to listen to the details will be the reason the problem can't get fixed.
To me trust means youre willing to treat people like a black box. If the detail about the outputs is another i/o or something about an output that would appear on a spec sheet, it should be included.
Inner details shouldn't matter. Thats what makes a good summary
Leadership still holds engineers accountable. And for that, they need to know the plan. Leaders are also held accountable, so again, they need to know the plan.
Sometimes the real reason is "overscoped work", "no time to fix tech debt", "information silos", "people being protective rather than collaborative", "people overloaded and losing sleep" -- all problems the SVP needs to fix.
A perfectly reasonable explanation is that this SVP needs to explain in a different room what steps are being taken to prevent it from occurring again.
> If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
I work in a competent team and leadership is required.
Another explanation is that not wanting the details of operations is based on complete lack of trust, not in the their competence but in the way they would describe things. The boss doesn't want the details because they are sure the details would make it seem like the underling did the right thing and moreover, monitoring that detail would just give the underling leverage over them.
The boss wants to know about changes to avoid this but whatever it is, they'll push back on its extent and won't want to hear about details then either.
The devs job is to impliment and advise how to attain the owners goals and priorities, not to set goals or priorities except at layers below, and in the service of, the c suite's directives.
I'm not saying c suite are unquestionable gods, I'm saying that there is no such trust-or-not dichotomy. It's 2 different things.
No matter how ignorant I am in some domain and no matter how knowlegeable some expert is I hire to do something for me in that domain, they can only tell me how to get what I want, or what's the closest that is humanly possible, or the costs of various conflicting priorities and compromises. They can't tell me what to want.
Maybe I DO actually want to burn my whole budget and 5 years of time on some facet that they and most people would say is not important and not worth it to the point of being irrational. Their job is to inform me not to decide for me. I can trust them to inform me honestly and with good judgment and deep knowledge, and then to impliment what I decide also honestly and with competent skill. And yet I still need to be the one who is informed, and then makes a decision and issues a directive.
It's 2 different things.
It's like Steve Jobs being totally unreasonable about tiny details of fit & finish in the hardware products. It makes no sense (to most people) to have custom ethernet jacks manufactured (back when it wasn't so effortless and flexible) just to get them a certain color or material feel, when off the shelf jacks already exist from multiple sources that work just fine for a 10th or 100th the cost, while already meeting a stack of compatibility standards and even safety regulations. No trustworthy engineer would do that. They would actually see it as violating that trust.
Yup, several things are wrong with it even though it may be a good idea as a good shortcut on the part of the SVP
But it should be used and phrased better.
Used better:trust and only sometimes ask for the detials, like cutting the just-shuffled deck in a card game, sometimes the player to the dealer's right will just tap the deck instead of cutting it, in effect saying "I trust that shuffle". Sometimes, certainly enough to both keep the SVP well-grounded in the details, and to keep the team knowing the SVP is both watching and cares about the details, the SVP MUST ask for the details. Trust and verify.
In terms of phrasing, "I don't want the details" is all about the SVP sending the message s/he doesn't want to be bothered. The phrasing should be: "I trust you on the details on this one; let's go straight to what do we do to manage the next one of these?".
Notice leading with "I trust you on this", not "don't waste my time".
I would agree with you, this just sets up a scenario where the SVP positions themselves as a leader, without having to understand something technical, and without making the decisions on how to change things. It isnt about trust, it is about performing accountability so the SVP can say they did their job.
I think the author of the article is going out of their way to be charitable to the SVP for no reason. That meeting was a reassertion of power, not a wise move made by a sage.
If that's the case, that makes me much less sympathetic, even though I can understand how it's very disturbing to see the field suddenly changing like this.
When I go to that link it shows Black is winning with -1.9 eval at depth 32 with SF19 1MB NNUE! It looks like it got this evaluation from the cloud database.
Click on the switch to the left of the evaluation to run a local Stockfish 19 eval of the position.
Showing Black winning in that position is clearly a bug; at 20 ply Stockfish 19 sees a +0.3 edge for White (which is also wrong; it’s about +5 for White, i.e. clearly winning) and only a +0.6 edge at 24 ply.
To be fair, Topalov, right after this game (1999, so before modern computer analysis), analyzed the game for hours with his second and thought Black still had strong drawing chances after accepting the rook sacrifice.
I think there are some valuable lessons that chess can teach, if you approach it the right way:
- it teaches resiliency in bad situations.
- it teaches you to not be too harsh on yourself as a person. If you watch GMs playing online, they make bad mistakes all the time too - they're not godlike creatures who make no mistakes, far from it.
The flipside is that if you approach it the wrong way (I know I have at many points), it can have the opposite effects too.
To approach chess in a mentally healthy way was a long process for me. You need to get rid of your ego and be objective as much as possible when playing, or it will just make you sour - this in itself is a valuable lesson.
Probably not faster if I have to guess. The nuances of why 19 is better than 18 are likely indistinguishable from noise when they play against someone at a much lower level (i.e. any human).
This seems like an interesting alternative line of research. Design the a chess engine where the goal is to beat the best human in the minimum number of turns, while still offering ~no chance of human victory.
The Leela odds bots are working on a similar problem: beat humans starting down material. It's roughly grand master level starting down a rook, and for fast time control even starting down a queen
Unfortunately Chess (unlike Go) doesn't have a good handicap system. When playing without a piece (or two) it is not chess anymore OR it doesn't really matter.. During how many games does Queen's rook come into play during early middle game?
Go, on the other hand has a nice handicap system (which doesn't change the nature of the game too much). One can have a fighting chance against a much stronger player with enough handicap (Upto 9 stones). In Chess terms, an IM can have a _decent_ game against a GM. Probably lose. But the GM has to work for it.
the rook is fairly useless early game (which is why rook and knight odds are surprisingly close), but the queen actually does a lot in the early midgame (just mostly not by moving). The queen is usually keeping a bunch of squares indirectly defended, the trick is that the queen starts in a pretty good position and is much more mobile, so its importance doesn't come from where it is, but where it could be in 2 movies
Stack overflows are also trivial to check for, if one wants to. It's just comparing two pointers, plus checking for arithmetic overflow (in case the pointers run past the maximum value of the pointer type).
> What these comments all miss is that ensuring your 13 million lines actually encode what you intend them to encode
I don't think the comments are missing that at all. If the Lean compiler itself is bug-free, we can trust its verification of the 13 million lines of code. We don't need to verify them by hand.
The encoding of the theorem itself needs to be trusted, as does the compiler. The proof doesn't need to be trusted, it gets checked by the compiler.
But what does it matter whether we can "trust its verification of the 13 million lines of code"? We already knew that Fermat's Last Theorem is true, we don't need Lean to tell us that. The value of a formalization would be to improve our understanding of why it's true, and that can't be achieved by 13 million lines of code no human being has read.
The source article does acknowledge this isn't a replacement for human analysis, but they seem to imagine a vision of mathematical research where there's a bunch of AIs running around proving random things and formalizing them into opaque Lean proofs nobody ever has to read. I'm skeptical whether there's any value in doing that, and to the extent that there is I'm pretty confident it looks more like proving certain directions aren't fruitful for further investigation.
That's a completely different matter than what this thread was about. This thread was about whether mistakes in the 13M lines of Lean code could mean that this proof could be wrong despite Lean saying it's right.
Something about this feels wrong:
- If you trust them completely, you don't need to know what happens next either. Just trust them to do the right things, your leadership isn't required.
- If you don't trust them completely, how can you know if "what happens next" is appropriate without knowing the details?
Isn't this just reinforcing the idea that leadership doesn't need to have their feet on the ground?
The best leaders I've worked with were paying attention to things from the bottom-up as well as top-down.
reply