Where does this term come from? I think we need a page of examples (from programming, life, management, etc) and this page will not be orphaned, I promise :) --dl
- trephaning was used to release evil spirits from the skull
- bloodletting was used to treat all manner of illness, including anemia
- incorrect species of leeches were used to treat infected wounds ("good" ones are back in use today to selectively destroy diseased tissue; "bad" ones eat everything)
- mercury was used to treat syphilis (sometimes effectively, but it's the other times I'm referring to)
- Victorian-era women took arsenic to give themselves a fashionably pale complexion
- Perhaps not much worse than irradiating your skin in the sun to get a tan
- "Alternative" treatment as a complete replacement for Western medical treatment for deadly conditions (affirmations, homeopathy, magnets, faith healers, chinese herbs, etc)
- Antibiotics have been used for decades on patients with viral infections such as colds and flu (for those who are not aware, antibiotics have no effect on viruses, but over the long term helps create antibiotic-resistant disease, making this a foolishly counter-productive and barbaric practice -- and has been known to be such since at least the 1960s).
- shock therapy?
- Moving the baby seat from the front seat to the back seat saves lives -- or does it? http://www.asktog.com/columns/054ChildSafetySeats.html
- Some people insisted that car airbags must have an on-off switch. That increases the chance that the switch will be left in the "wrong" position (or that the switch would wear out and fail), increasing the chance of death. Fewer people would die if airbags were hard-wired to always deploy in an accident.
- Thalidomide for nausea caused by pregnancy.
- Some newsreaders refuse to post messages unless they have some minimum amount of new content (not including quoted lines). People fixed this problem by adding several lines of gibberish.
- In 1999, some webmasters feared that crackers or Y2K bugs might knock their websites offline. So they took their websites offline during the year rollover (Jan 1, 2000 and the previous day).
Kill them all...
Saw this on FarSide.
The victorious French were once debating how to differentiate "good christians" from "heretics". The solution was to "Kill them all, for the Lord will know his own".
- It is frightening to note that this type of practice gets repeated throughout history.
"In the 13th century under the authority of Pope Innocent III, it was ordered that France be cleansed of the Cathar heresy by a crusade. The town of Beziers was besieged, but the citizens of the town, 99% Catholic, refused to surrender the few Cathars amongst them. When the town fell, the leader of the crusader army asked advice from Arnaud-Armaury, the Abbot of Citeaux as to how to identify the heretics. He answered "Kill them all. God will know his own." All 20,000 residents of the town were slaughtered, including perhaps 200 Cathars."
Most often paraphrased as "kill them all, let god sort them out", and attributed to e.g. a sergeant in WWI/WWII/Vietnam etc.
Miracle (marketing of) drugs
Marketing of new wonder drugs has at times masked out voices of concern / dissent.
It was said once a drug has been approved "as safe", the marketing machinery takes over and new negative evidence will be drowned out.
Arthritis cure can be life threatening
In 2005 the wonder arthritis pain relief drug Vioxx was finally withdrawn from Australian sales and a class action suit was launched, on strong evidence of significant heart attack/stroke cases it can cause. The drug carried no warning label and the marketing machinery has been successful in countering negative experience in US for years.
Viagra and Blindness
Another wonder drug, this one for "better lifestyle", linked to possibility of blindness (stroke in the eye?) in 2005. The story is still developing for another hugely successful drug.
more meetings
Problem: impossible deadline but development is falling further behind rather than catching up.
Management "solution": begin holding mandatory-attendance 2 hour meetings daily so that each member of the development team can explain progress or lack thereof. Developers who point out that this aggravates the problem by subtracting (10 hours * N developers) of development time per week are threatened with termination.
- Wishful thinking. Engineers are simply expected to make up the 10 hours/week with overtime. If they didn't want to suffer through daily 2-hour meetings, the lazy clods shouldn't have slipped the schedule in the first place.--PointyHairedBoss
- I should have mentioned that this only occurs if all developers are already working 14 hour days 7 days a week. :-|
This is not a fantasy from Dilbert, this actually happens over and over again in different companies.
I can confirm that statement. It can and does happen all the time... In fact it just did.
See also
MotivationByGreaterDifficulty
discussion
An extreme example of being worse than the disease: ImakeTool.
Don't get me started. :)
- Oh, go ahead. (I couldn't bring myself to say more than the name.)
GNU autoconf (when it needs to be modified or created from scratch or even just understood).
- I disagree -- autoconf is hairy and its use of m4 is nasty, but it's reasonably straightforward. automake on the other hand, is in dire need of an exorcism.
- I don't understand. I know all the prerequisites, including m4, but modifying autoconf files gives me the hives, big time. Are you saying that it actually isn't so bad once you get used to it??? Did I just not read the right documentation???
Yourdon.
There is some evidence that thalidomide has some interesting applications in treating several kinds of blood cancers, some exotic tumours and leprosy. However there's considerable resistance to the idea because of what happened. As one doctor on the subject put it "This side effect is unique in that it does not have to happen", you just don't take the drug while pregnant. Nevertheless, a lot of people are campaigning against re-licencing it. Just because a cure is worse than one disease doesn't mean it's worse than all diseases.. --KatieLucas
- There are numerous other drugs out there which pregnant women are advised to avoid (including OTC stuff like ibuprofen), either because it hasn't undergone sufficient testing to demonstrate that it won't harm the mother or fetus; or because it has been shown to harm fetuses.
- Umm, yeah, but little is as vividly dramatically tragic as a thalidomide baby. It's not even entirely clear to me (not being 100% up on the subject) that fetal alcohol syndrome is worse. Very little is. Taking ibuprofen may indeed be bad for babies, but it surely isn't even on the same scale.
Cure Worse Than The Disease