Jon Goff has an interesting post on deciding when to quit, a critical ability for success.

Is it always right to keep going and see any difficult task through to completion, no matter the difficulty? Or is it best sometimes to reevaluate and change course when the going gets tough? How do you know which situation is which?

One of the things I got hammered into me growing up was the power of determination. If you set your mind to it, the saying goes, there is almost nothing you can't accomplish. Unfortunately, I've ran into several situations in the past which have made me wonder when it really is best to keep slogging through a tough problem, and when it truly is wisest not to keep slogging away at it, but to completely change courses.

In a sense, this is a trap into which NASA has fallen many times (Shuttle and ISS both being excellent examples, and Ares may be as well), but they are often forced by politics to forge ahead with bad ideas. This is one of the many reasons that we will have to privatize space in order to make much progress.

There's probably a lesson here for the administration vis a vis Iraq as well--clearly, we'll have to do something different. The problem is that now the different thing that the people in charge want to do is give up and claim defeat, instead of coming up with a way to win.

Simberg
I know you would like to put the democrats in the blame
for the disaster that is Iraq, but, all they do is spend some
money. Congress raises taxes, allocates money and
issues policy directives.

The President is Commander in Chief, Head of State and
Chief Executive. It's his job alone to command military
forces, negotiate with foreign powers, and execute
policy.

The president has chosen to take new direction, the first
is by firing the SecDef, the next thing he could do is
actually talk to the iranians and syrians and turks.
The third one is he needs to create a strategy.

Now, if you were to help out, by, buying a few
Liberty Bonds, or working over there, or even just
learning arabic, you might be part of the solution.

Sitting here, blaming the democrats isnt' going to sell.

Rand,
Thanks for the link. And yes, Iraq and the current exploration architecture were both in the back of my mind while writing this. As for Iraq, it feels a lot like my thesis. Maybe if we continue defining down victory, and try some different clever things, we might just be able at some point in the future to make our achievements recross that victory line. But on the other hand, I'm not sure time is really on our side in Iraq. And like the igniter example, by the time we do achieve what has now been defined as victory, will it have truly been worth it? There's a real possibility that sticking through to the bloody end might end up even worse all things considered than even the most reckless of withdrawals right now.

I'm not really sure to be honest. I have a gut distaste for occupation and nation building. I really think that it suffers from the same fatal conceit of central planning that Hayek warned about in other parts of life. I'm deeply skeptical that in the end what we'll have achieved is really, on net, the best for the Iraqi or the American people. I'm skeptical that it will have made us even slightly safer from terrorists, or made the Middle East a less scary place. But you already knew I felt that way.

But like I said, these questions are tough.

~Jon

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein.