Another variation of the ‘cognitive trap,’ David Weiss explores the inverse relation between confidence and knowledge—again through the lens of software development, sort of the zebrafish of organization psychology.

David Weiss: Metacognitive Miscalibration

He goes on to characterize several cases of the miscalibration of confidence and thinking. “Wicked Problems” could be considered as similar to those physics problems you first struggled to complete in high school, which helpfully neglected messy factors like air resistance at the expense of effective accuracy. As you add in all of the variables required by the actual underlying complexity, the problem eventually collapses. The “Desire to Learn” dovetails with the previously linked Raganwald predicament, where a sense of sufficient knowledge forestalls efforts to deepen understanding. “Personal Pride” evokes the admonition common in entrepreneurship and venture capital to “fail quickly” and not let fear of failure paralyze you.

Finally, the “Well Intended Deception” describes a situation more specific to software programming where levels of abstraction can hide deeper problems—sometimes an emphasis on simplicity through inheriting framework code results in an offset in opacity. The upfront ease of using pre-made tools and resources can be undone by the lack of transparency into what’s really going on when you need to dig into the details. This is a balancing act, as it’s often more efficient to build on proven platforms and add just distinguishing features as custom effort. Thus a new product like Pixelmator, even with only one designer and one developer, can usurp some of the mighty Adobe Photoshop’s turf by building on established open-source and Apple-provided APIs. The parallel in videogame development is whether to build one’s own engine, a la Id Software, or license a middleware product like the Unreal Engine. The former gains full optimization and customization options at the cost of major additional engineering effort; the latter can focus on just a specific game’s logic rather than the underlying plumbing, but remain fundamentally limited by the licensed engine’s capabilities.

This ‘buy or build’ decision ripples through most manufacturing processes. Despite its long history of ‘Not Invented Here‘ myopia, Apple has lately shown a great deal of maturity in this area, with the move to Intel processors freeing up engineering to focus on new products like the iPhone and Apple TV; yet their recent purchase of P.A. Semi also shows that they intend to maintain a toehold at the lower levels of chip design.