Once one groks these three principles, what should one do next?
Succeed.
No, that is exactly wrong. The whole problem is that no course of action guarantees success. The world is throwing curveballs.
My own solution is to shift my terminal values to the meta level. Instead of demanding success of myself (and then feeling bad if success turns out to be unattainable) I reward myself with a gold star if I judge that I have done my best. I live my life so as to have no regrets.
The difficulty (you might call it a trap) in this approach is in the need to retain a brutal honesty. It may be very tempting to respond to failures by giving yourself the star anyways, with the excuse “How could I have known?”. How could I have known that wouldn’t work? How could I have known that is not what they wanted? How could I have known that my ‘friend’ was a con artist? There may well have been a way you could have known—clues that you missed.
It can be tricky finding the middle road of learning from your mistakes, without falling into the error of denying mistakes or obsessing over them.
This is a good point. It occurs to me that a disproportional number of people in this forum may have had the experience growing up of being the smartest, most promising kid in class. Maybe you were always put into the advanced classes even in subjects you weren’t interested in. As you advance, the competition gets a little tougher, but you learn to push yourself, too.
For the overwhelming majority of people, this cycle has to end, early or late, with the shock of realizing that you are finally out of your league. Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team.
The overwhelming number of people in historical times have died and been forgotten. How many people have lived? And of those, how many could possibly be even assigned a name by any historical records, let alone a place in popular memory?
Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team
This doesn’t follow. It might be that the dumbest person is still contributing productively. They’ll just be contributing the least. Moreover, there might be enough variation in specific skill sets that no one is actually the dumbest (although I find this second argument to be weak. The truth is that some people really are better than others). Now it is more plausible that some of the dumber people who also worked less ended up distracting people in the project enough that they were net negatives. But that sort of argument requires that they be not only stupid but lazy and disruptive. In practice, few people with those traits last long in serious research.
It might be that the dumbest person is still contributing productively. They’ll just be contributing the least.
This is true. I was thinking, though, of the purely emotional impact on someone who is used to being the smartest person in the room to suddenly finding himself the least smart person in the room. Specifically, it’s a lesson I have had to learn myself—for me, it was a lesson I started learning in high school, and have re-learned the lesson many, many times since then. It’s not a fun lesson.
Yes, indeed. I like it very much. Thank you. Though the recommendation might be more useful to people if it had appeared in a decision-theory (Newcomb, expected utility maximization, etc.) thread, rather than here in a practical rationality thread.
My own solution is to shift my terminal values to the meta level. Instead of demanding success of myself (and then feeling bad if success turns out to be unattainable) I reward myself with a gold star if I judge that I have done my best. I live my life so as to have no regrets.
Trouble is, “doing one’s best” is an elusive concept. Sure, there are situations where you have a clear goal and see a clear plan of action for how to give your best shot at it, so if you fail despite following it, you can still give yourself a gold star for doing your best. But at least in my experience, typical mistakes and failures in life are nothing like that. Truly critical problems and dilemmas usually can’t be tackled with such a clear and accurate model of reality.
When I reflect on my own mistakes and failures, most of them were due to misunderstandings of the situation and errors of judgment that seem clear in retrospect and would have been avoided by someone more shrewd and knowledgeable in the same situations, but were completely beyond my mental and intellectual powers at the time. Others were due to lack of willpower that seems like “failure to do my best” in retrospect, but back at the time, the necessary level of willpower seemed (and probably was) impossible. In both sorts of situations, I did “give my best” in a very real sense, since nothing else could have been expected from me. But this leads to a tautological interpretation of “doing one’s best” that would imply that nobody should ever have regrets about anything.
No, that is exactly wrong. The whole problem is that no course of action guarantees success. The world is throwing curveballs.
My own solution is to shift my terminal values to the meta level. Instead of demanding success of myself (and then feeling bad if success turns out to be unattainable) I reward myself with a gold star if I judge that I have done my best. I live my life so as to have no regrets.
The difficulty (you might call it a trap) in this approach is in the need to retain a brutal honesty. It may be very tempting to respond to failures by giving yourself the star anyways, with the excuse “How could I have known?”. How could I have known that wouldn’t work? How could I have known that is not what they wanted? How could I have known that my ‘friend’ was a con artist? There may well have been a way you could have known—clues that you missed.
It can be tricky finding the middle road of learning from your mistakes, without falling into the error of denying mistakes or obsessing over them.
This is a good point. It occurs to me that a disproportional number of people in this forum may have had the experience growing up of being the smartest, most promising kid in class. Maybe you were always put into the advanced classes even in subjects you weren’t interested in. As you advance, the competition gets a little tougher, but you learn to push yourself, too.
For the overwhelming majority of people, this cycle has to end, early or late, with the shock of realizing that you are finally out of your league. Some poor bastard had to come to terms with knowing that he was obviously the dumbest physicist on the Manhattan Project, a net drag on the team.
The overwhelming number of people in historical times have died and been forgotten. How many people have lived? And of those, how many could possibly be even assigned a name by any historical records, let alone a place in popular memory?
Q: What do they call the person who graduates at the bottom of their class at medical school?
A: Doctor.
Hell yeah! And may that doctor help to repair this deeply messed-up world!
This doesn’t follow. It might be that the dumbest person is still contributing productively. They’ll just be contributing the least. Moreover, there might be enough variation in specific skill sets that no one is actually the dumbest (although I find this second argument to be weak. The truth is that some people really are better than others). Now it is more plausible that some of the dumber people who also worked less ended up distracting people in the project enough that they were net negatives. But that sort of argument requires that they be not only stupid but lazy and disruptive. In practice, few people with those traits last long in serious research.
This is true. I was thinking, though, of the purely emotional impact on someone who is used to being the smartest person in the room to suddenly finding himself the least smart person in the room. Specifically, it’s a lesson I have had to learn myself—for me, it was a lesson I started learning in high school, and have re-learned the lesson many, many times since then. It’s not a fun lesson.
Maybe you will like this one:
No Regrets, or: Edith Piaf Revamps Decision Theory—Frank Arntzenius
Yes, indeed. I like it very much. Thank you. Though the recommendation might be more useful to people if it had appeared in a decision-theory (Newcomb, expected utility maximization, etc.) thread, rather than here in a practical rationality thread.
Yay—hookup points!
I have mentioned that paper previously here—on the Ingredients of Timeless Decision Theory thread.
Perplexed:
Trouble is, “doing one’s best” is an elusive concept. Sure, there are situations where you have a clear goal and see a clear plan of action for how to give your best shot at it, so if you fail despite following it, you can still give yourself a gold star for doing your best. But at least in my experience, typical mistakes and failures in life are nothing like that. Truly critical problems and dilemmas usually can’t be tackled with such a clear and accurate model of reality.
When I reflect on my own mistakes and failures, most of them were due to misunderstandings of the situation and errors of judgment that seem clear in retrospect and would have been avoided by someone more shrewd and knowledgeable in the same situations, but were completely beyond my mental and intellectual powers at the time. Others were due to lack of willpower that seems like “failure to do my best” in retrospect, but back at the time, the necessary level of willpower seemed (and probably was) impossible. In both sorts of situations, I did “give my best” in a very real sense, since nothing else could have been expected from me. But this leads to a tautological interpretation of “doing one’s best” that would imply that nobody should ever have regrets about anything.