"Knowing the rules and remembering the rules are two completely different things"
About this Quote
Simon Travaglia points out a mischievous but serious truth about human systems: mastery and memory are not the same currency. You can study a policy, pass a test on it, even believe you have internalized it, and still fail to summon it at the precise moment when it matters. Anyone who has tried to recall a complex password policy under deadline pressure knows the gap between comprehension and recall.
Travaglia is best known for the Bastard Operator From Hell stories, where office life, IT rules, and bureaucratic rituals collide. In that world, rules proliferate as a substitute for trust and design, creating a paper shield against error. Yet the more rules there are, the more they compete for a user’s limited working memory. Under stress, context switches, or fatigue, recall degrades and the elaborate rulebook might as well be invisible. The humor lands because it is recognizably true: the problem is not only ignorance, it is remembering in the wild.
Cognitive science backs the joke. Recognition is easier than recall; cues aid performance; memory is context dependent and fragile under load. Rules function only when they are accessible at the point of action, not merely stored somewhere in a brain or binder. That is why checklists revolutionized aviation and medicine; they externalize memory so that knowing can reliably become doing.
There is also a sly critique of organizational dynamics. When compliance depends on perfect recollection, failure is treated as moral rather than predictable. People get blamed for being human instead of systems being designed to accommodate human limitations. Travaglia’s line nudges toward a practical ethic: simplify rules, make the important ones salient, provide prompts and automation, and expect forgetting as a property of real workplaces. Authority can demand knowledge; effectiveness requires remembering, and remembering needs help.
Travaglia is best known for the Bastard Operator From Hell stories, where office life, IT rules, and bureaucratic rituals collide. In that world, rules proliferate as a substitute for trust and design, creating a paper shield against error. Yet the more rules there are, the more they compete for a user’s limited working memory. Under stress, context switches, or fatigue, recall degrades and the elaborate rulebook might as well be invisible. The humor lands because it is recognizably true: the problem is not only ignorance, it is remembering in the wild.
Cognitive science backs the joke. Recognition is easier than recall; cues aid performance; memory is context dependent and fragile under load. Rules function only when they are accessible at the point of action, not merely stored somewhere in a brain or binder. That is why checklists revolutionized aviation and medicine; they externalize memory so that knowing can reliably become doing.
There is also a sly critique of organizational dynamics. When compliance depends on perfect recollection, failure is treated as moral rather than predictable. People get blamed for being human instead of systems being designed to accommodate human limitations. Travaglia’s line nudges toward a practical ethic: simplify rules, make the important ones salient, provide prompts and automation, and expect forgetting as a property of real workplaces. Authority can demand knowledge; effectiveness requires remembering, and remembering needs help.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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