Conversation

A question that has been repeatedly coming up for me lately is: when should you act to prevent something failing when you know you have the power to “spot” it and help it not fail in the short term. My default has shifted over 20y from “almost always act” to “almost never act”
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Most failures are neither permanent nor actually avoidable. The learning has to accrue. If a baby has to fall 100 times while learning to walk (no idea what actual number is), preventing one fall just moves out the 100th fall milestone. So only backstop dangerous falls.
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Same is true of inevitable failures and pretty much guaranteed eventual learnings. For example, no point making peace in one instance if a relationship headed for an irreversible rift/failure unless the delay buys you something else.
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The main reason people feel the urge to arrest failure is because the optics of real learning is ugly. There is a misguided belief that yiu can hide the ugliness of learning curves and aestheticize them. You can’t. It will just manifest another, uglier way if you try.
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Real life learning montages are pure cringe. Karate kid screwed us up on that front too, by making it seem like it can be look not cringe. Wax-on, wax-off my ass.
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All learning is failure (though not all failure is learning). At some level, fast failure, Darwinist design etc are just the end-to-end laziest way to do anything. Trying to short-cut learning curves almost never works. And trying is not just futile, but pure loss overhead cost.
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The only exception is “unreasonable effectiveness of X” types of knowledge. X = math, data, etc. Learning equivalent of free lunches. They are very rare but seem ubiquitous because every time we find one we build an institution around it.
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There’s one good reason to hide (but not prevent) failures. It’s a dead give away of a vulnerable learner. Sign that you’re easy sociopath prey. So it’s a safety thing. Fake it till you make it is mostly that kind of value. If you use it for marketing you’ll never stop faking.
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Wonder if school principals feel this way. They lead institutions devoted by design to relentless of failure. The point of a school is for kids to come and fail there for a few hours daily while building up failure tolerance and finding the few things where they fail less.
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In that sense schools fail their “best” students the most. Straight A’s students learn everything except the only thing they need to: how to fail. Failing a class or being held back a grade is stigma. Straight A’s is prestigious. Backwards.
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“Love of learning” is bullshit because taken seriously that translates to “love of failure.” Nobody likes that. Constant failure is a sign you should quit before you die. What people fall in love with is getting unreasonably lucky where you fail less than expected = is “aptitude”
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I'm listening too. But some people fail a lot less while learning because some kind of ability (eg top sportspeople). And not all of them are working harder than others.
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"I love to learn" container holds curiosity and discovery, perhaps information processing, but without the application/experimentation? If you are able to avoid being clumsy, awkward or embarrassed, it isn't learning?