I’ve read, including on lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence), that often listening to those who failed is more useful than those who succeeded, but I somehow missed if there was an explanation somewhere as to why? And the fact is that there are 1000 ways to be wrong and only 1 way to do something right, so if you listen to a story about success, it should be 1000 times longer than a story about failure, because for the latter it is enough to make one fatal mistake, while for the former you have to not make the whole thousand.
However, in practice, stories of failure and stories of success are likely to be about the same length, since people will take note of about the same number of factors. In the end, you will still have to read 1,000 stories each, whether success or failure, except that success happens 1,000 times less often and the stories about it will be just as short.
fwiw I don’t think I’ve heard this particular heuristic from LessWrong. Do you have a link for a place this seemed implied?
I think there’s a particular warning flag about “selection effects from successes” (i.e. sometimes a person who succeeded just did so through luck). So, like, watch out for that. But I remember hearing a generalized thing about learning more from failure than from success.
In truth, listen to everybody. But recognize that different stories have different filters and distortions. Neither success nor failure storytellers actually understand the complexity of why things worked or didn’t—they will each have a biased and limited view.
I’ve read, including on lesswrong (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence), that often listening to those who failed is more useful than those who succeeded, but I somehow missed if there was an explanation somewhere as to why? And the fact is that there are 1000 ways to be wrong and only 1 way to do something right, so if you listen to a story about success, it should be 1000 times longer than a story about failure, because for the latter it is enough to make one fatal mistake, while for the former you have to not make the whole thousand.
However, in practice, stories of failure and stories of success are likely to be about the same length, since people will take note of about the same number of factors. In the end, you will still have to read 1,000 stories each, whether success or failure, except that success happens 1,000 times less often and the stories about it will be just as short.
fwiw I don’t think I’ve heard this particular heuristic from LessWrong. Do you have a link for a place this seemed implied?
I think there’s a particular warning flag about “selection effects from successes” (i.e. sometimes a person who succeeded just did so through luck). So, like, watch out for that. But I remember hearing a generalized thing about learning more from failure than from success.
I added link to comment: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/34Tu4SCK5r5Asdrn3/unteachable-excellence
In truth, listen to everybody. But recognize that different stories have different filters and distortions. Neither success nor failure storytellers actually understand the complexity of why things worked or didn’t—they will each have a biased and limited view.