Followup to: Don't Fear Failure

In the same theme as the last article, I think that failure is actually pretty important in learning. Rationality needs data, and trying is a good source of it.

When you're trying to do something new, you probably won't be able to do it right the first time. Even if you obsess over it. Jeff Atwood is a programmer who says Quantity Always Trumps Quality

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Where have I heard this before?

Last post, I talked about how trying things out yourself is a good way to learn about them. This post, I'm going to talk about ideas that helped me overcome one of my major obstacles to trying something -- fear of failure.

Overestimation of Damages: "Its not that big a deal"

In most cases, failure really isn't that big of a deal. Really. The difference between failure and a null action is the attempt. If the attempt isn't damaging, failure isn't damaging.

A few cases:

• Trying a new food/recipe? Maybe you don't like it and waste a few dollars. Maybe you mess it up. So you eat something else. Just don't do it for your first dinner with the in-laws and it should be fine. But a new dish might be totally delicious.
• Total stranger you think might be a cool person? Maybe they get annoyed at you. Then you can just break off and never talk to/see them again. Chatting with people I run into has made college visits much more enjoyable.
• Competition you might want to enter? Worst case scenario is that you lose. I learned a lot from Moody's Mega Math Challenge, and even though I don't think we did a particularly good job at modeling Lake Powell I still learned a lot about how mathematical modeling works.
• Dance you want to try? The worst that's likely is that you look a bit silly. Laugh it off.

There's lots of things where an attempt is actually worse than doing nothing. Jumping halfway to the other side of the ledge, for instance. Or only removing most of the toxic part of a pufferfish. But for a lot of potentially high-value things, a failed attempt doesn't really do much, so you might as well try them.

Rationality and Failure: "Don't panic"

Some people I know basically buckle under failure. A common failure mode seems to be to do something badly, establish an ugh field around that area, and then continue in a downward spiral. Getting a B on a math test turns into "Ugh, math", turns into "well I was never really good at that anyway", turns into a complete lack of effort. Here a little failure becomes a huge problem. A failure isn't catastrophic on its own, but giving up is.