After writing my own set of 50 and reading some others’, I noticed an ambiguity in the challenge that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Find 50 ways of sending something to the moon” could mean (1) “There’s something, never mind exactly what. Find 50 ways of sending it to the moon”. (Same something every time, and you don’t get to pick what.) Or (2) “Find 50 somethings and ways of sending them to the moon”. (Different something each time, and you get to pick what.) Or, in between those, (3) “Choose something and find 50 ways of sending it to the moon”.
I interpreted the challenge as #1. At least one person interpreted it as #3. For the avoidance of doubt, I think taking it as #3 is absolutely fine; at any rate, it doesn’t stretch the rules any further than some of the things I did in pursuit of #1. But my initial reaction on reading one other answer was “wait, that’s not even trying to do what the challenge demands” … until I actually went back, read more carefully, and saw the ambiguity. There’s an obvious moral to be drawn here, though in most real-life situations the right answer is to get the requirements clarified rather than to interpret them as loosely as possible :-).
My tendency is to look at the goals of the task I’m given (which were included in the original post) then interpret the constraints as liberally as possible to reach that goal. I suppose this is why I’ve spent most of my life as an entrepreneur, and very little as an employee :D.
Yeah, I deliberately avoided operationalising it a lot, to not make it too hard.
Though it just occurred to me today that you might honestly get a lot of the value even if you’re allowing magic and fiction. It is a creativity exercise after all. Just as it takes genuine skill to be a SpaceX engineer, I think it takes genuine skill to do world-building like J. K. Rowling.
Still, I do think there’s a lot of value in creativity given constraints. In finding ways to aim your creativity to actually strike the enemy (12th virtue). We could experiment with something more strict next week.
After writing my own set of 50 and reading some others’, I noticed an ambiguity in the challenge that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Find 50 ways of sending something to the moon” could mean (1) “There’s something, never mind exactly what. Find 50 ways of sending it to the moon”. (Same something every time, and you don’t get to pick what.) Or (2) “Find 50 somethings and ways of sending them to the moon”. (Different something each time, and you get to pick what.) Or, in between those, (3) “Choose something and find 50 ways of sending it to the moon”.
I interpreted the challenge as #1. At least one person interpreted it as #3. For the avoidance of doubt, I think taking it as #3 is absolutely fine; at any rate, it doesn’t stretch the rules any further than some of the things I did in pursuit of #1. But my initial reaction on reading one other answer was “wait, that’s not even trying to do what the challenge demands” … until I actually went back, read more carefully, and saw the ambiguity. There’s an obvious moral to be drawn here, though in most real-life situations the right answer is to get the requirements clarified rather than to interpret them as loosely as possible :-).
My tendency is to look at the goals of the task I’m given (which were included in the original post) then interpret the constraints as liberally as possible to reach that goal. I suppose this is why I’ve spent most of my life as an entrepreneur, and very little as an employee :D.
Yeah, I deliberately avoided operationalising it a lot, to not make it too hard.
Though it just occurred to me today that you might honestly get a lot of the value even if you’re allowing magic and fiction. It is a creativity exercise after all. Just as it takes genuine skill to be a SpaceX engineer, I think it takes genuine skill to do world-building like J. K. Rowling.
Still, I do think there’s a lot of value in creativity given constraints. In finding ways to aim your creativity to actually strike the enemy (12th virtue). We could experiment with something more strict next week.
I got a bit stuck around halfway through, and started to interpret it more and more liberally to squeeze out some more angles on it