A couple of things have been running around my head today. Driven my a pile of issues, from why the pro photographer is driven because the buttons on the pro bodies and the landscape camera — same brand, using the same lenses — are reversed, to the complexities within our health system, to the tendency to optimize everything.

We can become stupid clever. Too clever by half.

The “too clever by half” mindset often wants to optimize demonstrating its own cleverness. This, of course, is something hackers are particularly prone to. It can be a virtue of sorts when you’re doing exploratory design, but not when you’re engineering a production system. I’m not the first person to point out that if you write code that’s as clever as you can manage, it’s probably too tricky for you to debug.

A particularly dangerous form of too clever by half is when you assume that you are smart enough for your design to head off all failure modes. This is the mindset Nassim Taleb calls “fragilista” – the overconfident planner who proliferates complexity and failure modes and gets blindsided when his fragile construct collides with messy reality.

Now I need to introduce the concept of an incident pit. This is a term invented by scuba divers. It describes a cascade that depends with a small thing going wrong. You try to fix the small thing, but the fix has an unexpected effect that lands you in more trouble. You try to fix that thing, don’t get it quite right, and are in bigger trouble. Now you’re under stress and maybe not thinking clearly. The next mistake is larger… A few iterations of this can kill a diver.

The term “incident pit” has been adopted by paramedics and others who have to make life-critical decisions….

Too clever by half lands you in incident pits.

How do you avoid these? By designing to avoid failure modes. This why “KISS” – Keep It Simple, Stupid” is an engineering maxim. Buy the RTC to foreclose the failure modes of not having one. Choose a small-form-factor system your buddy Phil the expert hardware troubleshooter is already using rather than novel hardware neither of you knows the ins and outs of.

Don’t get cute. Well, not unless your actual objective is to get cute – if I didn’t know that playfulness and deliberately pushing the envelope has its place I’d be a piss-poor hacker. But if you’re trying to bring up a production mailserver, or a production anything, cute is not the goal and you shouldn’t let your ego suck you into trying for the cleverest possible maneuver.