Mental Inertia

Why are ideas so hard to change?

I see several AntiPatterns here that reinforce each other and together form a pattern language of MentalInertia:

Ideas As Old Friends (?): Somewhere I heard, "Ideas are like old friends: One does not readily part from them because of new ideas/friends. One has to get to know the new ideas first, and this takes time." This makes for individual mental inertia, i.e. it relates to one idea/one person.
GroupThink / TheAbileneParadox: Members of a group can reinforce each other's mental inertia, multiplying its effect. This relates to one idea/several persons. GroupThink can be a result of SurvivorshipBias.
Pattern Language (Anti-) Pattern (?): Just as patterns can reinforce each other in a pattern language, ideas can reinforce each other in a thought system (/belief system/ideology/...). People try to keep their thought systems consistent, of course. Thus, if you want to change one idea, you have to change several. Such a change is difficult to effect, and if it does occur, it is called a paradigm shift. This effect relates to several ideas/one person.
... ?

If these effects are combined, they can make people believe in literally anything, no matter how silly - extreme ideologies, religious sects, even patterns. :-)

-- FalkBruegmann

I am always on guard against MentalInertia. Some of the strategies that I use are (1) actively looking for alternative viewpoints (2) playing DevilsAdvocate (3) asking myself what the world would be like if X, where X is anything.

In other disciplines, like politics, people subscribe to magazines of contrary opinion to keep themselves limber.

This issue is particularly close to home for everyone here. How many formal methods people are there on Wiki? Wiki has evolved towards an ExtremeProgramming mindset due to the affinity that many people have with the ideas. Those who don't agree move on. Personally, I think that ExtremeProgramming is great, but I do feel that component oriented programming is something that we ought to pay attention to. Every indication that I have seems to point towards it eventually supplanting traditional OO. -- MichaelFeathers

... maybe I've been saying too much about XP ... stop me before I gush again ... -- RonJeffries

No way. ExtremeProgramming is a great idea. Besides, congregating around an affinity point is a very natural thing, an organizing principle for SystemsAsLivingThings. It is out of your hands and mine. WikiWikiWeb expresses ExtremeProgramming and a variety of supporting and auxiliary ideas daily. It must have some preference for them.

But, me.. I have to get this out of my system and hopefully get the feedback of all of you who have been doing OO twice and three times my puny eight years of exposure: BlackBoxComponentry.

-- MichaelFeathers

Check ConstructiveInterference... Wiki gives the appearance of having agreed upon ExtremeProgramming (and maybe it has) because some people with quick fingers ;-) and sufficient energy have typed rejoinders to every comment about it. The formalist community have not taken the energy to create and defend their Wiki territory. What my wife taught me early in our relationship is that the loudest person gets to speak last, but neither is necessarily correct, nor even has achieved agreement. -- AlistairCockburn

I agree. It is funny how this relates to DramaticIdentity. People are liable to think that the predominant view espoused by an aggregate (like Wiki) is the view of the identity Wiki. Do the people who do not offer contrary views give their tacit approval by their silence [SilenceImpliesConsent]? I don't know, but an external observer may not know the difference between one person speaking for an aggregate and the whole of the aggregate. Imagine if we all used Wiki anonymously. It would be exaggerated. However, I do feel that there is information loss in quick decision making. A person glancing through Wiki, for example, may not make note of the names and therefore make some quick decisions. Formalists for example, may have passed by rather than remain as lurkers. If formalists do not participate by even reading Wiki then I say that Wiki has a non-formalist identity. If they lurk then we have a case like the team you mentioned in ConstructiveInterference. Some parts are speaking more for the whole than they need to. It would call for intervention: OrganizationalIdentity.

I offer this as an example. I don't think I'd be happy to see more formalists here necessarily. ;-) -- MichaelFeathers

After reading the last two entries, I added the link to SurvivorshipBias to the list above. -- FalkBruegmann

DaveHarris made a real interesting comment about how people might see Wiki when they first arrive, and how topics on Wiki fade from view. I moved it to a link that he created: WikiIceberg. -- MichaelFeathers

Um, my point here was that "too much XP activity" is not a real problem. Maybe 20 pages were involved, which is only about 1% of the content of this database. That's not enough to drive anyone away. It might have seemed like a lot more when they regularly appeared in RecentChanges, but that was a transient effect. They don't do that any more. -- DaveHarris

WHAT IS MENTAL INERTIA?