“What good, then, does it do to blame circumstances for your failure? What good does it do? - to look over a huge causal lattice in which your own decisions played a part, and point to something you can’t control, and say: “There is where it failed.” It might be that a surgical intervention on the past, altering some node outside yourself, would have let you succeed instead of fail. But what good does this counterfactual do you? Will you choose that outside reality be different on your next try?”
If I am playing a game like chess and a complicated strategy comes crashing down and I lose, I find it perfectly acceptable to find the extenuating circumstance of my failure. In the example of a chess game, this circumstance will be a move that my opponent made. Once I find the problem I can see how my choices were made incorrectly and adjust my strategy to account for these extenuating circumstances in the future.
Another example: if I am robbing a bank and someone sets off an alarm and the police come and take me away, the alarm is an extenuating circumstance leading to failure. Once I find that in the lattice, I can look at my choices and decide how to account for them.
“For yea, I have watched some people be stopped in their tracks without trying by “obstacles” that other people I know, Silicon Valley entrepreneur types, would roll over like a steamroller flattening out a speedbump. That difference probably accounts for a lot of real life performance, and it probably has a great deal to do with what, exactly, you regard as a valid excuse—a condition that makes a failure not reflect badly on you.”
In this case, I would describe the failure of the people stopping to be that they forgot to look at why their lattice was connected to the extenuating circumstance. If they see the node as trouble it needs to be removed or made inept. Of course, if they never bother creating the lattice, they will never be able to do this.
Assigning blame is not a problem as long as the blame assignment eventually traces back to a choice you can make differently.
If you look at the entire lattice and never find a choice you could have changed then the event is not your fault. If an assassin whacks an important political figurehead I can create an entire lattice of blame and not find a single choice I made.
This breaks down in cases like the following example:
My mother-in-law once placed her sister on a bus and sent her off to another town. En route, the bus crashed and her sister died. Was my mother-in-law responsible for the death?
In creating the lattice, her choice to place her sister on the bus is inherently connected to the external event of the bus crashing. She did not choose for the bus to crash and none of her choices had anything to do with the crash, but it was her choice to place her sister on that particular bus. Common sense says that it was not her fault but there is a glaring node in the lattice.
A certain amount of logic needs to be taken into account when discovering the reason for an event. Specifically, the choice of putting her sister on the bus and the event of the bus crashing are independent of each other. Unfortunately, this does not change the fact that with a different choice the sister would have lived.
The faulty reasoning here is easier to see in this example:
Assume that Sally won a game show and there are three doors concealing three prizes. Two are minor, one is the vacation of a lifetime. Assuming the network plays nice and they randomly assigned the positions of all three prizes, it does not matter what door Sally chooses. If she chooses door A, she gets the vacation. If she chooses door B or C she will create her lattice and ask why she failed. She can trace the failure back to her own choice.
So I guess it seems like my method is not complete and oh-golly I am late. Well, I will post it here in case someone finds it interesting. Just mod me down if it does not make sense. Sorry.
“What good, then, does it do to blame circumstances for your failure? What good does it do? - to look over a huge causal lattice in which your own decisions played a part, and point to something you can’t control, and say: “There is where it failed.” It might be that a surgical intervention on the past, altering some node outside yourself, would have let you succeed instead of fail. But what good does this counterfactual do you? Will you choose that outside reality be different on your next try?”
If I am playing a game like chess and a complicated strategy comes crashing down and I lose, I find it perfectly acceptable to find the extenuating circumstance of my failure. In the example of a chess game, this circumstance will be a move that my opponent made. Once I find the problem I can see how my choices were made incorrectly and adjust my strategy to account for these extenuating circumstances in the future.
Another example: if I am robbing a bank and someone sets off an alarm and the police come and take me away, the alarm is an extenuating circumstance leading to failure. Once I find that in the lattice, I can look at my choices and decide how to account for them.
“For yea, I have watched some people be stopped in their tracks without trying by “obstacles” that other people I know, Silicon Valley entrepreneur types, would roll over like a steamroller flattening out a speedbump. That difference probably accounts for a lot of real life performance, and it probably has a great deal to do with what, exactly, you regard as a valid excuse—a condition that makes a failure not reflect badly on you.”
In this case, I would describe the failure of the people stopping to be that they forgot to look at why their lattice was connected to the extenuating circumstance. If they see the node as trouble it needs to be removed or made inept. Of course, if they never bother creating the lattice, they will never be able to do this.
Assigning blame is not a problem as long as the blame assignment eventually traces back to a choice you can make differently.
If you look at the entire lattice and never find a choice you could have changed then the event is not your fault. If an assassin whacks an important political figurehead I can create an entire lattice of blame and not find a single choice I made.
This breaks down in cases like the following example: My mother-in-law once placed her sister on a bus and sent her off to another town. En route, the bus crashed and her sister died. Was my mother-in-law responsible for the death?
In creating the lattice, her choice to place her sister on the bus is inherently connected to the external event of the bus crashing. She did not choose for the bus to crash and none of her choices had anything to do with the crash, but it was her choice to place her sister on that particular bus. Common sense says that it was not her fault but there is a glaring node in the lattice.
A certain amount of logic needs to be taken into account when discovering the reason for an event. Specifically, the choice of putting her sister on the bus and the event of the bus crashing are independent of each other. Unfortunately, this does not change the fact that with a different choice the sister would have lived.
The faulty reasoning here is easier to see in this example: Assume that Sally won a game show and there are three doors concealing three prizes. Two are minor, one is the vacation of a lifetime. Assuming the network plays nice and they randomly assigned the positions of all three prizes, it does not matter what door Sally chooses. If she chooses door A, she gets the vacation. If she chooses door B or C she will create her lattice and ask why she failed. She can trace the failure back to her own choice.
So I guess it seems like my method is not complete and oh-golly I am late. Well, I will post it here in case someone finds it interesting. Just mod me down if it does not make sense. Sorry.