Single bad things happen to you at random. Iterated bad things happen to you because you’re a dumbass. Related: “You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships.”
Corollaries: The more of a dumbass you are, the less well you can recognize common features in iterated bad things. So dumbasses are, subjectively speaking, just unlucky.
The corollary is more useful than the theorem:-) If I wish to be less of a dumbass, it helps to know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like bad luck, so my first job is to learn to distinguish bad luck from enemy action. In Eliezer’s specific example that is going to be hard because I need to include myself in my list of potential enemies.
What we want to find is the denominator common to all of your failed relationships, but absent from the successful relationships that other people have (the presumed question being “why do all my relationships fail, but Alice, Bob, Carol, etc. have successful ones?”). Oxygen doesn’t fit the bill.
It could also be that Alice, Bob, and Carol’s relationships appear more successful than they are. We do tend to hide our failures when we can.
I’ve heard the failed-relationships quote before, but hadn’t seen it generalized to bad things in general. I like that one. Useful corollary: “Iterated bad things are evidence of a pattern of errors that you need to identify and fix.”
Of course, “bad things”, and even more so “iterated bad things”, have to be viewed relative to expectations, and at the proper level of abstraction. Explanation:
Right level of abstraction
“I punched myself in the face six times in a row, and each time, it hurt. But this is not mere bad luck! I conclude that I am bad at self-face-punching! I must work on my technique, such that I may be able to punch myself in the face without ill effect.” This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is “abstain from self-face-punching”.
Substitute any of the following for “punching self in face”:
Extreme sports
Motorcycle riding
Fad diets
Prayer
Right expectations
“I’ve tried five brands of water, and none of them tasted like chocolate candy! My water-brand-selection algorithm must be flawed. I will have to be even more careful about picking only the fanciest brands of water.” Again this is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is “This water is just fine and there was nothing wrong with my choice of brand. I simply shouldn’t have such ridiculous expectations.”
Substitute any of the following for “brands of water” / “taste like chocolate candy”:
Sex partners / knew all the ways to satisfy my needs without me telling them
Computer repair shops / fixed my computer for free after I spilled beer on it, and also retrieved all my data [full disclosure: deep-seated personal gripe]
Diets / enabled me to lose all requisite weight and keep it off forever
Computer repair shops / fixed my computer for free after I spilled beer on it, and also retrieved all my data [full disclosure: deep-seated personal gripe]
Ah, I’ve been in that job. My favorite in the stupid-expectations department was a customer who expected us to lie about the cause of a failure on the work order, so that his insurance company would cover the repair. When we refused, he made his own edits to his copy of the work order....and a few days later brought the machine back (I forget why) and handed us the edited order.
We photocopied it (without telling him) and filed it with our own copy. That was entertaining when the insurance company called.
The thing is, some of the steps are very vague
You’re right of course, this was meant to be fully general. Details should be tuned on each specific instance.
If you have a bad case of insufficient clue, what’s the cure?
I’m not sure I understood what you mean, but I guess you’re thinking about cases where you can’t have a “perfect experimental setup” to collect information. Well, in this case one should do the best with the information one has (though information can also be collected from other external sources of course). Sometimes there’s simply not enough information to identify with sufficient certainty the best course of action, so you have to go with your best guess (after a risk/reward evaluation, if you want).
Well, it’s somewhat hidden in steps 2 and 3. You have to be able to correctly state your hypothesis and to indentify all the possible variables. Consider chocolate water: your hipothesis is “There exist some brands of water that tastes like chocolate candy”. Let’s say for whatever reson you start with a prior probability p for this hypothesis. You then try some brands, find that none tastes like chocolate candy, and should therefore apply bayes and emerge with a lower posterior.
What’s much more effective, though, is evaluating the evidence you already have that induced you to believe the original hypothesis. What made you think that water could taste like chocolate? A friend told you? Did it appear in the news? In the more concrete cases:
Sex partners : Why did you expect them to be able to satisfy you without your input? What is your source? Porn movies?
Computer repair shops : Why did you expect people to work for free?
Diets : Have you talked to a professional? Gathered massive anedoctale evidence?
“You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships.” != “Why do all my relationships fail?”
Both you and others have relationships, both “failed” and “not-failed” (for some value of failed). The statement “You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships” is clearly false, even if comparing to others who have successful ones in search of differentiating factors. The “only” is the problem even then.
The intended formulation, I should think, is “You are the only denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships” (which is to say that it might be a contingent fact about your particular set of failed relationships that it has some more common denominators, but for any set of all of any particular person’s failed relationships, that person will always, by definition, be common to them all).
Even this might be false when taken literally… so perhaps we need to qualify it just a bit more:
“You are the only interesting denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships.” (i.e. if we consider only those factors along which relationships-in-general differ from each other, i.e. those dimensions in relationship space which we can’t just ignore).
That, I think, is a reasonable, charitable reading of the original quote.
It’s not nitpicking on my side, there are plenty of people who tend to blame themselves for anything going wrong, even when it was outside their control. Maybe they lived in a neighborhood incompatible to themselves, especially pre-social media. Think of ‘nerds’ stranded in classes without peers. Sure, their behavior was involved in the success or failure of their relationships (how could it not have been?). However, a mindset and pseudo-wise aphorisms such as “you are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships” would be fueling an already destructive fire of gnawing self-doubt with more gasoline.
Maybe they lived in a neighborhood incompatible to themselves, especially pre-social media. Think of ‘nerds’ stranded in classes without peers.
can be viewed as a case of “wrong level of abstraction” as I alluded to here.
I think what we have here is two possible sources of error, diametrically opposed to each other. Some people refuse to take responsibility for their failures, and it is at them that “you are the only common denominator …” is aimed. Other people blame themselves even when they shouldn’t, as you say. Let us not let one sort of error blind us to the existence of the other.
When it comes to constructing or selecting rationality quotes, we should keep in mind that what we’re often doing is attempting to point out and correct some bias, which means that the relevance of the quote is obviously constrained by whether we have that bias at all, or perhaps have the opposite bias instead.
That 70s Show
Single bad things happen to you at random. Iterated bad things happen to you because you’re a dumbass. Related: “You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships.”
Corollaries: The more of a dumbass you are, the less well you can recognize common features in iterated bad things. So dumbasses are, subjectively speaking, just unlucky.
The corollary is more useful than the theorem:-) If I wish to be less of a dumbass, it helps to know what it looks like from the inside. It looks like bad luck, so my first job is to learn to distinguish bad luck from enemy action. In Eliezer’s specific example that is going to be hard because I need to include myself in my list of potential enemies.
(That’s fair.)
Also, oxygen. (Edit: “You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships.” is misleading, hiding all the other common elements.)
What we want to find is the denominator common to all of your failed relationships, but absent from the successful relationships that other people have (the presumed question being “why do all my relationships fail, but Alice, Bob, Carol, etc. have successful ones?”). Oxygen doesn’t fit the bill.
It could also be that Alice, Bob, and Carol’s relationships appear more successful than they are. We do tend to hide our failures when we can.
I’ve heard the failed-relationships quote before, but hadn’t seen it generalized to bad things in general. I like that one. Useful corollary: “Iterated bad things are evidence of a pattern of errors that you need to identify and fix.”
Of course, “bad things”, and even more so “iterated bad things”, have to be viewed relative to expectations, and at the proper level of abstraction. Explanation:
Right level of abstraction
“I punched myself in the face six times in a row, and each time, it hurt. But this is not mere bad luck! I conclude that I am bad at self-face-punching! I must work on my technique, such that I may be able to punch myself in the face without ill effect.” This is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is “abstain from self-face-punching”.
Substitute any of the following for “punching self in face”:
Extreme sports
Motorcycle riding
Fad diets
Prayer
Right expectations
“I’ve tried five brands of water, and none of them tasted like chocolate candy! My water-brand-selection algorithm must be flawed. I will have to be even more careful about picking only the fanciest brands of water.” Again this is the wrong conclusion. The right conclusion is “This water is just fine and there was nothing wrong with my choice of brand. I simply shouldn’t have such ridiculous expectations.”
Substitute any of the following for “brands of water” / “taste like chocolate candy”:
Sex partners / knew all the ways to satisfy my needs without me telling them
Computer repair shops / fixed my computer for free after I spilled beer on it, and also retrieved all my data [full disclosure: deep-seated personal gripe]
Diets / enabled me to lose all requisite weight and keep it off forever
Ah, I’ve been in that job. My favorite in the stupid-expectations department was a customer who expected us to lie about the cause of a failure on the work order, so that his insurance company would cover the repair. When we refused, he made his own edits to his copy of the work order....and a few days later brought the machine back (I forget why) and handed us the edited order.
We photocopied it (without telling him) and filed it with our own copy. That was entertaining when the insurance company called.
This can be easily generalized as an algorithm.
Something repeatedly goes wrong
Identify correctly your prior hypothesis
Identify the variables involved
Check/change the variables
Observe the result (apply bayes when needed)
Repeat if necessary
Scientific method applied to everiday life, if you want :)
The thing is, some of the steps are very vague. If you have a bad case of insufficient clue, what’s the cure?
I’m not sure I understood what you mean, but I guess you’re thinking about cases where you can’t have a “perfect experimental setup” to collect information. Well, in this case one should do the best with the information one has (though information can also be collected from other external sources of course). Sometimes there’s simply not enough information to identify with sufficient certainty the best course of action, so you have to go with your best guess (after a risk/reward evaluation, if you want).
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear.
I meant that if you have a deep misunderstanding of what’s going on, as here, what do you do about it?
Well, it’s somewhat hidden in steps 2 and 3. You have to be able to correctly state your hypothesis and to indentify all the possible variables. Consider chocolate water: your hipothesis is “There exist some brands of water that tastes like chocolate candy”. Let’s say for whatever reson you start with a prior probability p for this hypothesis. You then try some brands, find that none tastes like chocolate candy, and should therefore apply bayes and emerge with a lower posterior. What’s much more effective, though, is evaluating the evidence you already have that induced you to believe the original hypothesis. What made you think that water could taste like chocolate? A friend told you? Did it appear in the news? In the more concrete cases:
Sex partners : Why did you expect them to be able to satisfy you without your input? What is your source? Porn movies?
Computer repair shops : Why did you expect people to work for free?
Diets : Have you talked to a professional? Gathered massive anedoctale evidence?
“You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships.” != “Why do all my relationships fail?”
Both you and others have relationships, both “failed” and “not-failed” (for some value of failed). The statement “You are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships” is clearly false, even if comparing to others who have successful ones in search of differentiating factors. The “only” is the problem even then.
The intended formulation, I should think, is “You are the only denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships” (which is to say that it might be a contingent fact about your particular set of failed relationships that it has some more common denominators, but for any set of all of any particular person’s failed relationships, that person will always, by definition, be common to them all).
Even this might be false when taken literally… so perhaps we need to qualify it just a bit more:
“You are the only interesting denominator guaranteed to be common to all of your failed relationships.” (i.e. if we consider only those factors along which relationships-in-general differ from each other, i.e. those dimensions in relationship space which we can’t just ignore).
That, I think, is a reasonable, charitable reading of the original quote.
It’s not nitpicking on my side, there are plenty of people who tend to blame themselves for anything going wrong, even when it was outside their control. Maybe they lived in a neighborhood incompatible to themselves, especially pre-social media. Think of ‘nerds’ stranded in classes without peers. Sure, their behavior was involved in the success or failure of their relationships (how could it not have been?). However, a mindset and pseudo-wise aphorisms such as “you are the only common denominator in all of your failed relationships” would be fueling an already destructive fire of gnawing self-doubt with more gasoline.
I agree. This sort of thing...
can be viewed as a case of “wrong level of abstraction” as I alluded to here.
I think what we have here is two possible sources of error, diametrically opposed to each other. Some people refuse to take responsibility for their failures, and it is at them that “you are the only common denominator …” is aimed. Other people blame themselves even when they shouldn’t, as you say. Let us not let one sort of error blind us to the existence of the other.
When it comes to constructing or selecting rationality quotes, we should keep in mind that what we’re often doing is attempting to point out and correct some bias, which means that the relevance of the quote is obviously constrained by whether we have that bias at all, or perhaps have the opposite bias instead.
There is such a thing as bad luck, though perhaps it’s less in play in relationships than in most areas of life.
I think that if you keep having relationships that keep failing in the same way, it’s a stronger signal that if they just fail.
Alternatively, iterated bad things happen because someone is out to get you and messes constantly with what you are trying to do.