MathiasKB🔸 comments on Joseph’s Quick takes

[MathiasKB🔸]

More dakka is to pour more firepower onto a problem. Two examples:

Example: “bright lights don’t help my seasonal depression”. More dakka: “have you tried even brighter lights?”

Example: we brainstormed ten ideas, none of them seem good. More dakka: “Try listing a 100 ideas”

[Arthur Malone🔸]

I think the examples you give are actually contrary to the useful message of “more dakka.”

Yours suggest “if something doesn’t work, try more of it,” which in general is poor advice. Sometimes it’s true that you need more of something before you hit a threshold that generates results. But most of the time, negative results are informative and should guide you to change your approach.

More dakka is about when something does work, but doesn’t solve the problem entirely, or is easy to drop off rather than continue. It’s a useful concept trying to correct for an observed tendency to ignore only-somewhat-positive results.

Example: “bright lights seemed to help a bit, but my seasonal depression is still lingering.” More dakka: “have you tried even brighter lights?”

Example: “we brainstormed ten ideas and got some that seemed workable, but they still have issues.” More dakka: “Try listing a 100 ideas before committing to a so-so one from the first ten.”

@Joseph “dakka” is just an onomatopoeic term for the sound of a machine gun (“dakka dakka dakka”), and the phrase comes from the TV tropes entry. The fanciful names there are useful for fun, reference-based humor (and I use them a lot in my persona life!), but I do think porting them over to EA-jargon is probably net negative for clarity/​professionalism.

[Ben Millwood🔸]

Not that it’s super important, but TVTropes didn’t invent the phrase (nor do they claim they did), it’s from Warhammer 40,000.