Lord Matt

I’ve been watching The West Wing a lot lately, and it occurs to me that I’m guilty, frequently, of bullshitting people on a topic to avoid exposing my lack of knowledge thereof. It’s a fire-and-forget attitude that can get a person in trouble, not to mention burning the wrong information into the brain. It seems inexcusable for a person in a technical (some say scientific) profession, but the quest for knowledge produces results only so fast, and time is money.

So we lie, not completely aware that we’re even doing so. Nobody wants to look like a dope, even though everybody knows that nobody knows everything. We lie, perhaps because finding all the answers we need to conduct an informed discussion is a long and frustrating process. Or maybe it’s because nobody wants to feel defeated, regardless of the facts. There’s quite a lot of this in software development, where almost nobody knows anything up front and just about the entire process is an experiment.

It’s not as though all of this suddenly came to the surface by seeing Martin Sheen on television. But the show makes firm one important idea: that there are things far more important than winning an argument.

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