The times I was able to get people to do things that they felt were too unlikely to commit to were largely about lowering the emotional costs of failure. The context is a bit different, but it seems likely that some of the same factors apply.
Using “writing HPMoR” as an example, there’s more than one thing failure could be taken to mean. One is “I tested a high risk high reward idea, and it didn’t pan out. I learned something useful about what kinds of things I can’t do (right away, at least), and it still strikes me as having been worth attempting, given what I knew at the time. If I keep trying high risk high reward ideas one of them is likely to pay out, because the idea that I’m limited by what social expectations would see as “modest” isn’t even worth taking seriously”. A completely different thing it could mean is “I was arrogant to think I had a chance at this. I learned nothing on the object level because I already knew I couldn’t do it, but on the meta level I learned that I was wrong to set this aside and hope. In hindsight, it was a mistake that never was worth trying in the first place, and if I keep trying high risk high rewards things I’m just going to keep failing because social expectations of what I’m capable of are *right*”. The people with the latter anticipation are going to be less thrilled about flipping that coin with a 50% chance of success because the other 50% hurts a lot more.
The former mindset *sounds* a lot better, and people are going to want to say “yeah, that one sounds right! I believe *that* one!” even when their private thoughts tend towards the latter mindset. If you try to get someone in the latter category to act like they’re in the former category, you’re going to run into motivation problems. You’re going to hear “You’re right, and I want to… I just can’t find the motivation”.
In order to get people to shift from “failure means I should be less confident and try less” to “failure means this particular one didn’t pan out, and it’s still worth trying more”, you have to be able to engage with (and pass the ‘ideological turing test’ of) their impulses to take failure as indicative of a larger problem. There is definitely a skill to this, and it can be tough when you can plainly see that the right answer is to “just try it”. At the same time, it’s a skill that can be learned and it does work for opening things up for change.
Gambling and interviewing seem like the opposite sides of the same “trying a low-probability undertaking” approach. In the former case you want the person to realize, after losing a few times, that winning at gambling is not a fruitful undertaking, except in some very specific circumstances. In the latter case, even if someone failed to secure an offer several times in a row, you want the person to continue trying until they succeed. Yet emotionally the situation can be similar, or even reversed.
Good point. Note that gambling has the added difficulty in that it’s emotionally adversarial—the casino/bookie is setting the game and environment to confuse the player’s estimates of success probability and magnitude. Interviewing probably has a little of this in that many interviewers are more interested in making themselves feel smart than in hiring the candidates that will contribute most.
In any case, focusing on someone’s motivation and their perception of the distribution of successes and failures should be secondary to analysis of the real possible outcomes. For most people, there exist jobs they shouldn’t interview for. A blanket “keep trying” is unhelpful, without specific analysis of expected value.
The times I was able to get people to do things that they felt were too unlikely to commit to were largely about lowering the emotional costs of failure. The context is a bit different, but it seems likely that some of the same factors apply.
Using “writing HPMoR” as an example, there’s more than one thing failure could be taken to mean. One is “I tested a high risk high reward idea, and it didn’t pan out. I learned something useful about what kinds of things I can’t do (right away, at least), and it still strikes me as having been worth attempting, given what I knew at the time. If I keep trying high risk high reward ideas one of them is likely to pay out, because the idea that I’m limited by what social expectations would see as “modest” isn’t even worth taking seriously”. A completely different thing it could mean is “I was arrogant to think I had a chance at this. I learned nothing on the object level because I already knew I couldn’t do it, but on the meta level I learned that I was wrong to set this aside and hope. In hindsight, it was a mistake that never was worth trying in the first place, and if I keep trying high risk high rewards things I’m just going to keep failing because social expectations of what I’m capable of are *right*”. The people with the latter anticipation are going to be less thrilled about flipping that coin with a 50% chance of success because the other 50% hurts a lot more.
The former mindset *sounds* a lot better, and people are going to want to say “yeah, that one sounds right! I believe *that* one!” even when their private thoughts tend towards the latter mindset. If you try to get someone in the latter category to act like they’re in the former category, you’re going to run into motivation problems. You’re going to hear “You’re right, and I want to… I just can’t find the motivation”.
In order to get people to shift from “failure means I should be less confident and try less” to “failure means this particular one didn’t pan out, and it’s still worth trying more”, you have to be able to engage with (and pass the ‘ideological turing test’ of) their impulses to take failure as indicative of a larger problem. There is definitely a skill to this, and it can be tough when you can plainly see that the right answer is to “just try it”. At the same time, it’s a skill that can be learned and it does work for opening things up for change.
Gambling and interviewing seem like the opposite sides of the same “trying a low-probability undertaking” approach. In the former case you want the person to realize, after losing a few times, that winning at gambling is not a fruitful undertaking, except in some very specific circumstances. In the latter case, even if someone failed to secure an offer several times in a row, you want the person to continue trying until they succeed. Yet emotionally the situation can be similar, or even reversed.
Good point. Note that gambling has the added difficulty in that it’s emotionally adversarial—the casino/bookie is setting the game and environment to confuse the player’s estimates of success probability and magnitude. Interviewing probably has a little of this in that many interviewers are more interested in making themselves feel smart than in hiring the candidates that will contribute most.
In any case, focusing on someone’s motivation and their perception of the distribution of successes and failures should be secondary to analysis of the real possible outcomes. For most people, there exist jobs they shouldn’t interview for. A blanket “keep trying” is unhelpful, without specific analysis of expected value.