Thinking tool: More dakka

Adam Jones

Personally

This is my personal blog, where I write solely in my personal capacity. It does not represent the positions of any organisations I'm associated with.

Also, everything here is provded "as is", without warranties of any kind, express or implied.

1 September 20261 September 2026

If something works a bit, and it looks like doing more might continue to work, do more!

This sounds obvious, but Zvi's classic post on this gives the example:

In a MetaMed case, a patient suffered from a disease with a well-known reliable biomarker and a safe treatment. In studies, the treatment improved the biomarker linearly with dosage. Studies observed that sick patients whose biomarkers reached healthy levels experienced full remission. The treatment was fully safe. No one tried increasing the dose enough to reduce the biomarker to healthy levels.

[...]

It sounds crazy that it could be overlooked. It’s overlooked.

(Zvi's post has a bunch more excellent commentary, and explains why more dakka solutions get overlooked.)

Examples:

• At BlueDot, scaling up the entry-level courses got a lot more people in the pipeline. Even if the average quality bar was slightly lower, because the courses were self-serve it didn't negatively affect the experience of top talent, and meant we could also select more top talent who we might otherwise have missed. (Though there are some trade-offs here with reducing batch size to shorten cycle time)
• On several projects: Hiring a couple of contractors was good. Hiring a bunch of contractors was great. Having redundancy reduces delivery risk, and generally having more people does get work done faster if it's parallelizable.
• Many people are productive during their working hours. For most of them, working more hours would mean getting more done.¹

  Most != all!

  Also, being productive at work is not everyone's end goal in life.

  Although productivity is good: there are a lot of important problems in the world that you can fix! (And if your work isn't fixing them, consider changing that)

Related concepts

This is part of my thinking tools series. Also consider:

• Overcorrect, then settle: the same "turn the dial much further" move, applied to behaviour change
• Shorten cycle times, reduce batch sizes: more reps also allows you to experiment with different dose sizes