I suspect that in general big mistakes cause defeat much more often than excellent moves cause victory. There are some theoretical reasons to suspect this is true from recent statistical analysis of human and computer decisions in chess.
I wonder how much of life outcome (after accounting for genetics and your parents’ wealth) is determined by your mistakes.
I wonder how much of life outcome (after accounting for genetics and your parents’ wealth) is determined by your mistakes.
Life is horribly imbalanced; small mistakes can cause insanely disproportional damage. It takes literally a few seconds of time and really bad luck to get killed or injured forever. I know a few people who have serious health problems originating with “when I was a small kid, I was doing [a prefectly innocent activity all kids do all the time], and at some moment I fell down and something broke, and at first everyone thought it would heal okay, but since then at random moments I keep feeling horrible pain in [a body part], and it’s been like this for decades, and doctors have no idea how to fix it properly”. Or, while it can take only a few minutes to get insights like “eating healthy food and exercising regularly should become one of my top priorities, because it makes life longer and more pleasant”, you still have to take everyday actions for months and years to actually achieve this. And then, one unlucky fall may break your spine, and you may end in a wheelchair forever.
One moment of depression is enough to commit suicide, but years of health care cannot cure cancer. Signing one bad contract can cost you a lot of money. It is easy to damage property, but more difficult to fix it. Etc. Even speaking of rationality, good ideas typically additionally require a lot of work, but bad ideas can ruin your life in a few minutes easily.
Sometimes there are opposite situations, for example one could spend years in an abusive relationship, and then end it in an afternoon. Or it may take a while to apply for a great job that requires skills you already happen to have. Making a good friend can significantly improve your life afterwards. -- But it still feels like these are rare exceptions, while the opportunities to ruin your life are there all the time, we just usually avoid them.
It could be interesting to look at one’s own life, and try to classify things that had nontrivial impact, by two criteria: “good decision” vs “bad decision”, and “one-time decision” vs “repeated decision”. But there is a problem that “mistakes we didn’t make” are quite invisible. For example, it would be easy to forget things like “not doing crime” or “not taking drugs” in the list of good repeated decisions, but it probably has a big impact. I am not making this list right now, because it would take too much time, but maybe I will do it later privately.
It seems to me that how to be smart varies widely between professions. (...) Yet such concepts as “be willing to admit you lost”, or “policy debates should not appear one-sided”, or “plan to overcome your flaws instead of just confessing them”, seem like they could apply to many professions. And all this advice is not so much about how to be extraordinarily clever, as, rather, how to not be stupid. Each profession has its own way to be clever, but their ways of not being stupid have much more in common. And while victors may prefer to attribute victory to their own virtue, my small knowledge of history suggests that far more battles have been lost by stupidity than won by genius.
Debiasing is mostly not about how to be extraordinarily clever, but about how to not be stupid. Its great successes are disasters that do not materialize, defeats that never happen, mistakes that no one sees because they are not made. Often you can’t even be sure that something would have gone wrong if you had not tried to debias yourself. You don’t always see the bullet that doesn’t hit you.
The great victories of debiasing are exactly the lottery tickets we didn’t buy—the hopes and dreams we kept in the real world, instead of diverting them into infinitesimal probabilities. The triumphs of debiasing are cults not joined; optimistic assumptions rejected during planning; time not wasted on blind alleys. It is the art of non-self-destruction. Admittedly, none of this is spectacular enough to make the evening news.
I wonder how much of life outcome (after accounting for genetics and your parents’ wealth) is determined by your mistakes.
Life is horribly imbalanced; small mistakes can cause insanely disproportional damage. It takes literally a few seconds of time and really bad luck to get killed or injured forever. I know a few people who have serious health problems originating with “when I was a small kid, I was doing [a prefectly innocent activity all kids do all the time], and at some moment I fell down and something broke, and at first everyone thought it would heal okay, but since then at random moments I keep feeling horrible pain in [a body part], and it’s been like this for decades, and doctors have no idea how to fix it properly”. Or, while it can take only a few minutes to get insights like “eating healthy food and exercising regularly should become one of my top priorities, because it makes life longer and more pleasant”, you still have to take everyday actions for months and years to actually achieve this. And then, one unlucky fall may break your spine, and you may end in a wheelchair forever.
One moment of depression is enough to commit suicide, but years of health care cannot cure cancer. Signing one bad contract can cost you a lot of money. It is easy to damage property, but more difficult to fix it. Etc. Even speaking of rationality, good ideas typically additionally require a lot of work, but bad ideas can ruin your life in a few minutes easily.
Sometimes there are opposite situations, for example one could spend years in an abusive relationship, and then end it in an afternoon. Or it may take a while to apply for a great job that requires skills you already happen to have. Making a good friend can significantly improve your life afterwards. -- But it still feels like these are rare exceptions, while the opportunities to ruin your life are there all the time, we just usually avoid them.
It could be interesting to look at one’s own life, and try to classify things that had nontrivial impact, by two criteria: “good decision” vs “bad decision”, and “one-time decision” vs “repeated decision”. But there is a problem that “mistakes we didn’t make” are quite invisible. For example, it would be easy to forget things like “not doing crime” or “not taking drugs” in the list of good repeated decisions, but it probably has a big impact. I am not making this list right now, because it would take too much time, but maybe I will do it later privately.
Related: Debiasing as Non-Self-Destruction
An awesome reminder, thanks.