Risk, success, and failure
A draft Less Wrong post circulated to the Overcoming Bias NYC mailing list, in the same series as “Levels of Action” and “Don’t Fear Failure.” The argument: in a society saturated with marketing, almost no one notices ordinary failures, so the expected value of trying more projects — even ones likely to fail — is positive.
Followup to Levels of Action and Don’t Fear Failure .
When you do something new, in addition to accomplishing your goal, you get more information about the techniques you can use to accomplish stuff — what works and what doesn’t. For instance, if you just got your driver’s license and are driving to work, you get to work on time. But you also gain information about how to drive, which will help the future you be a better driver. In terms of levels of action, doing something new on one level is also partly doing something on the level above that. If you work for Google and are reading a programming textbook, that’s a Level 2 action. But if this is your first programming textbook, it’s also a Level 3 action — because when you read it, you’re getting information about how programming textbooks work compared to other learning methods.
However, there’s also a downside: the possibility of failure. If you’ve never done something before, and don’t really know what you’re doing, you’re likely to fail. I claim that, in most circumstances, the potential consequences of failure should largely just be ignored; you don’t lose anything, other than the resources you initially invested. But why is that?
As a first example, consider the beginning of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Wikipedia page: Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger… is an Austrian American bodybuilder, actor, model, businessman, and politician, who is currently serving as the 38th Governor of California.
Schwarzenegger began weight-training at fifteen. He was awarded the title of Mr. Universe at age 22 and went on to win the Mr. Olympia contest a total of seven times…
Schwarzenegger gained worldwide fame as a Hollywood action film icon, noted for his lead role in such films as Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator …
As a Republican, he was first elected on October 7, 2003, in a special recall election to replace then-Governor Gray Davis… Schwarzenegger was then re-elected on November 7, 2006…
Schwarzenegger is married to journalist Maria Shriver. The two have four children.
The beginning of the article, all five paragraphs, is entirely about Arnold’s successes. None of his failures are even mentioned. I don’t know all that much about Arnold, but he must have had failures on the way to success — everyone does. But when one looks at the biographies of anyone famous, one discovers something interesting. For the most part, the only things that count when trying to accomplish something, in politics or science or business or art, are your successes — the things you did well. Your failures, the things you did badly, are very nearly irrelevant. People count the hits and forget the misses. You can see this pattern when you Google the biography of nearly any famous person — it’ll mostly be about the things they achieved, and not the things they failed to achieve. Why doesn’t the article talk about a high school club that Arnold did a bad job managing, for instance?
For the most part, it’s because people simply don’t notice. With a few exceptions (like pedophilia), if you don’t try to get people to notice you, they won’t. There are all sorts of incredible, wonderful things lying around undiscovered, because the people who know about them either aren’t good at marketing, or don’t have the resources for it. We already know about immortality and saving lives for under $1,000 and changing the destiny of all mankind. What else is out there? I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some scientist somewhere has already cured cancer, and people just didn’t notice. And of course, few want to advertise their failures; if people don’t even care when someone discovers a possible cure for Death, and spends twenty years trying to market it, what chance do they have of noticing that you acted silly at the party across town three weeks ago?
However, we are all still primed by evolution to think that other people are watching, and will notice everything that we do. In the ancestral environment, if you lived in a group of under a hundred people, those hundred people would sure remember every time you screwed up. A bad enough screwup might negatively affect their opinion of you for years and years. And this is far from just an ancestral phenomenon; it still seems to be true, for example, in middle schools and prisons. So, what happened? Why don’t people notice things much anymore? (Here, I refer to the public at large, and not your close friends. If you insult your brother, they still might remember in a month. However, the guy at the hot dog stand won’t.)
Consider a town where there are two soda stores, Vendor A and Vendor B. Both A and B sell soda from roadside stands. Initially, Vendors A and B are identical — they have the same locations, same prices, the same quality, and they each have 50% of the market. Now, suppose that Vendor A wants to make more money. What can he do? He has four options: he can expand the market for soda, raise the price of soda, lower his own cost of production, or steal market share from Vendor B.
The first one would be very difficult; raising the city’s population would be hard, and the people of the city already drink so much soda that it’s rotting their teeth. The second, of course, requires that he develop a better quality product, or people would have no reason to buy his soda instead of the cheaper Soda B. The third requires that he find a way to cut costs without lowering quality, or, again, people will just switch to Soda B. The second and third could be done, but they are still quite difficult. To improve soda quality or lower cost would require thinking about the soda production process, and most people dislike thinking.
What about the fourth option, stealing market share from Vendor B? Well, it still requires work, but it’s a lot more straightforward than the other three. All you have to do is persuade people who drink B to switch to A, and the human brain is built to persuade other people to your point of view. So, Vendor A goes out on the town every night, and puts up big posters telling people to switch to Soda A. The campaign is a spectacular success — next week, his market share rises to 80%.
Now, what does Vendor B do? Naturally, he notices Vendor A’s success, and the next week, he goes around and puts up his own, identical posters. Since both A and B now have posters, people are once again indifferent between the two, and the week after that, A’s market share drops back to 50%.
Notice how, after both rounds of marketing, society is strictly worse off: no one has benefited. The citizens of the city are still drinking the same soda, at the same price, from the same stores as before. Both A and B still have the same revenue, and the same costs of production. The only difference is that A and B have wasted a large amount of money and time putting up their posters; A and B are now both worse off than they were at the beginning.
This sequence of events is isomorphic to the Prisoner’s Dilemma: both parties would benefit if they agreed to not put up posters, but each individual is strictly better off if they do put up posters. There is, however, one important difference. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma (or, more generally, the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma), there are only two options: cooperate or defect. The damage that can be done by defecting is significant, but it doesn’t include the possibility of larger and larger negative payoffs. With marketing, on the other hand, you can continue developing more and more effective marketing strategies, which your competitors can then copy, requiring you to develop even more effective strategies, and so on ad infinitum. It’s as if the Prisoner’s Dilemma, in addition to having “cooperate” and “defect”, also had “super-defect”, and “super-super-defect”, and “super-super-super-defect”…
We, as a civilization, are already a long, long way into this spiral. It’s been going on for well over eighty years now (it was the main basis for Hitler’s rise to power). So, if you ever want to get people’s attention — for any reason at all — don’t expect it to be easy. There are already ten zillion other people out there competing for it, and their strategies have been refined and tested and updated over decades and decades.
The flip side of this, one of the biggest advantages to living in such a world, is that people don’t spontaneously notice anything, including failure; something has to be marketed before anyone notices. And some things are much easier to market than others. To be marketable, an idea should be simple, believable, and unexpected: people aren’t interested in hearing about the same things over and over. If some random person fails at something, it isn’t unexpected. Random people fail at random things all the time: everyone’s life, no matter who they are, is full of failures and mistakes. Eliezer Yudkowsky once said, “If I tried to make a better car from bronze squares, and failed completely, ending up with a heap of scrap metal, there would be nothing surprising about that. More experienced engineers would just shake their heads wisely and say, ‘That’s why we use iron triangles, kiddo.’”
Most people, including most Less Wrongers (and me), aren’t already famous enough to be paid attention to by default. As far as I know, out of the top 10 karma scorers on Less Wrong today, only Eliezer is. And if you aren’t already famous, if you try to (say) start a web business for six months and fail, few people will notice, and even fewer will remember for any length of time. So, if you try a bunch of projects in succession, the net sum is likely to be positive, even if most of the projects are failures. It also follows that, all else being equal, one should try to do more projects rather than fewer projects, because the expected utility of an additional project (even one likely to fail!) is still probably positive.
How should one go about doing that? There’s (supposedly) a Chinese saying about how opportunity is always knocking, but only some people are able to hear it. I think this is a bad metaphor (although not completely inaccurate), because knocking implies something loud and forceful; a knock is something that makes you stop what you’re doing, and pay attention to the interruption. This is, as far as I can tell, the complete opposite of the truth. Finding real opportunity, in my experience, is more like fishing. You sit there, and wait, and watch things happen; then, from out of the distance, something approaches. But it won’t demand your attention or interrupt what you’re doing, and it’s probably not going to bite on its own. You have to make an effort to notice it, and then take action yourself to lure it in.
There are a large number of goals that are useful for just about anything. These include things like money, power, friends, skill, toughness, experience, and so forth. These goals are sufficiently broad that there are always little opportunities, floating by on the wind, that can help fulfill them. An email from a stranger, asking for help on a project. A poster about participating in an economics study. A chance to volunteer somewhere. An ad for a job in your field.
If these things look like they might be useful, do them! Carpe diem — seize the day, seize the moment, seize the opportunity. Don’t let the opportunity disappear back into the ether. Grab it, hold on to it, and only let it back if you’ve investigated it and you know it’s a dud (which is different from the intuitive guesstimate that “it probably won’t amount to anything”).
One of people’s main objections, I suspect, is that seizing the day demands resources — investments of time, money, energy. This, of course, is true. But ask the question: are these resources being used for anything? Are you doing something instead of nothing with the resources you have? (“Something” certainly includes things like vacations and fun, if vacations and fun would genuinely be useful, and new kinds of fun usually are.) If not, why not seize the day, and do something with your spare three hours? Why let opportunity go to waste?
A corollary to this is: if you are busy seizing opportunity on a regular basis, don’t feel too bad about any single, missed chance, or any one thing that you made a mistake on. More chances will come along; they always do. The phrase “once in a lifetime opportunity”, as far as I can tell, is hogwash. And the opportunities that come later will probably be comparable in importance to the one you lost earlier. Exceptional things, by definition, are rare; most of the time, the importance of the missed opportunity will be about average.