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Warrigal comments on The Wrongness Iceberg - Less Wrong Discussion
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To me, there seems to be something kind of off about this sentence. Suppose I'm trying to get better at a game like Starcraft. Starcraft is sufficiently complicated that attaining a basic level of still (by which I mean "macromanagement": being able to ensure that all your resources are being used somehow, without worrying about using them well) takes hours and hours of practice. And during that practice, you will inevitably make mistakes; the only way to avoid making mistakes is by not practicing. Indeed, every mistake teaches you something, so I'm tempted to say that what you want to do is to maximize the number of mistakes you make.
In short, it seems to me that minimizing the number of mistakes you make doesn't serve the purpose of making you more skilled. So what purpose does it serve?
Sure, in the very short run (starting from absolutely no knowledge of the game) you'd have to make mistakes to learn anything at all. But the process of getting better is a gradual decrease of the frequency of those mistakes. You'd want to minimize your mistakes as much as possible as you got better, because the frequency of mistakes will be strongly correlated with how much you lose.
I think you're seeing "try to minimize how many mistakes you make" and reading that as "trying to make no mistakes." There are certainly mistakes you'll have to make to get better, but then there are superfluous mistakes that some people may make while others won't, or catastrophic mistakes that would make you look really bad which you'd definitely want to avoid. The depth of mistakes can go much deeper than the necessary mistakes you'd have to make to get better, in other words.
Mm, that all sounds like it's true if you only play games against the same skill level of opponent. If you increase the difficulty level at the same speed that you gain speed, then you won't start winning more games. I guess it's true that you'll stop making some mistakes, but in addition, some things that previously weren't mistakes will become mistakes.
In any case, I guess it's certainly true that there are things you can do that will both decrease the number of mistakes that you make and increase your rate of learning, such as paying more attention.