They took the wheels off the trebuchet

From lessons on burnout by el gato malo.  The subheading is: we took the wheels off the trebuchet.

life is full of wonderful allegories. here is one of my favorites:

a bunch of engineering students who found the plans for a medieval trebuchet and decided to build it. a trebuchet is a siege weapon capable of throwing enormous rocks vast distances and battering down city and castle walls. it was a helluva piece of technology and this one was alleged to be able to toss some pretty impressive tonnage. so they followed the plans and made one. when they fired it, it tore itself apart from the stress of its action. so they built it again using stronger wood, better fittings, etc. same issue. tore itself apart when fired. at this point, they were about to give up and presume the plans to be faulty when someone noticed something: in the plans, all the devices had wheels on them. the presumption had been that they were just to move it around. they were not. they were to suck up the recoil and diffuse the stress. they added wheels, and the device started tossing boulders with alacrity.

this has led to a phrase in my group of friends: “they took the wheels off the trebuchet.” in our secular vernacular, this means “they did not understand the system they were tinkering with and removed a vital part because they did not realize that it was, in fact, vital and now, it does not work anymore.”

generally, when this happens, everyone starts casting around for explanations. (and they are almost always wrong) they rarely see the vital piece they took out. they seek to ascribe malfunction to outside factors or orthogonal/tangential issues.

all this talk of “job burnout” seems to be very much a “we took the wheels off the trebuchet” issue.

Reminds me of Chesterton's Fence.

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”