Karl Popper came up with the idea in the 1930's that scientists should attempt to falsify their hypotheses rather than to verify them. The basic reasoning is that while you cannot prove a hypothesis to be true by finding a number of different confirming instances (though confirming instances do make you more confident in the truth), you can prove a hypothesis to be false by finding one valid counter-example.
Now Orin Thomas writes at WindowsITPro that you’ve probably diagnosed hundreds, if not thousands, of technical problems in your career and Popper's insights can serve as a valuable guide to avoid a couple of hours chasing solutions that turn out to be an incorrect answer. According to Thomas when troubleshooting a technical problem many of us “race ahead” and use our intuition to reach a hypothesis as to a possible cause before we’ve had time to assess the available body of evidence. "When we use our intuition to solve a problem, we look for things that confirm the conclusion. If we find something that confirms that conclusion, we become even more certain of that conclusion. Most people also unconsciously ignore obvious data that would disprove their incorrect hypothesis because the first reaction to a conclusion reached at through intuition is to try and confirm it rather than refute it."
Thomas says that the idea behind using a falsificationist method is to treat your initial conclusions about a complex troubleshooting problem as untrustworthy and rather than look for something to confirm what you think might have happened, try to figure out what evidence would disprove that conclusion. "Trying to disprove your conclusions may not give you the correct answer right away, but at least you won’t spend a couple of hours chasing what turns out to be an incorrect answer."
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday May 25 2015, @07:41PM
So what in the world is WindowsITPro and why should we take troubleshooting advice from them? The name doesn't immediately inspire confidence and I've never heard of them before. A Windows source talking about troubleshooting could be really good, since Windows is notorious for its problems, so maybe they have more experience than, say, a Linux person who sets up a box and basically forgets about it for years.
I'm not saying this Popper stuff wouldn't work, but it sounds like it would take too long. Experienced troubleshooters zero in quickly on the part of the system that is causing the problem, and do it intuitively because they've done it so many times.
The worst kind of troubleshooting is the "try this, try that" approach where someone wants you to reboot, or rename a DLL, or install something, or change a file - totally random things that even if they worked you wouldn't know why. People who have that approach make me cringe.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Monday May 25 2015, @07:58PM
I gave up trying to support closed systems long ago. Now, I tell people "I don't do windows."
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday May 25 2015, @08:04PM
A Windows source talking about troubleshooting could be really good, since Windows is notorious for its problems,
Long ago I ran Windows, pre-linux era. One day I was the recipient of a Blue Screen of Death, and the message written there, excited on the phosphors of the living CRT itself, was: "There has been an undetectable error in your system." For years I have marveled over the usefulness of that message, but what really boggled my mind was, if the error was in fact undetectable, how did Windows know it was there?
(Score: 4, Touché) by Dunbal on Monday May 25 2015, @08:11PM
"Kernel panic: fatal exception" is much more expressive.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Marand on Monday May 25 2015, @11:06PM
"Kernel panic: fatal exception" is much more expressive.
What's wrong with that? Everyone knows kernels are skittish and easily frightened, so it should surprise no one that it crashed when it encountered a dead exception.
If you think that's bad, wait until you see how panicked it gets when it notices lp0 is on fire [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday May 25 2015, @08:22PM
Simple: No error could be detected for some time. Being Windows, there was no chance that there was no error for such a long time, therefore there must have been an undetectable error, or else it would have been detected. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday May 25 2015, @10:18PM
I don't know what that means, either, but reading about software finding an undetectable error has pushed me into a new state of transcendence. I am going to have to start using Windows. I didn't know it was so profoundly powerful. It's like they skipped self-aware AI and went straight to AI sunyata!
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)