Extenuating Circumstances

You seem to be taking it as a given that failure reflects on you. This represents a tremendous toll on mental energy, and it's the very first type of belief that I train people to get rid of in order to stop procrastinating and increase their throughput.

If you're worried about whether something is an excuse for failure, in other words, you're already thinking too much about failure for your own good.

See Seligman (optimist/pessimist thinking) and Dweck (fixed/growth mindsets) for why... in particular, note that their experimentally validated models of successful and struggling people's thought processes blow away your model of what "extenuating circumstances" to consider.

Optimists and "Growth"-minded individuals have no problem using extenuating circumstances to explain the past, since the past is already over and not subject to modification. Their focus is on what they learned about what they should do in the future. But this isn't "excusing" anything, because they're not under the mistaken impression that failure actually reflects on them.

When I consider doing less, I consider that this would make me a horrible awful unforgivable person. And then I cheerfully shake hands with others who aren't trying at all to save the world.

This is pretty much a standard thought pattern that crops up in treating people with the "fixed" mindset; you can find plenty of examples in the dialogues of Robert Fritz's books, where he uses logic to debunk the idea that a person needs to justify their existence by saving the world... or doing anything worthwhile at all. I used similar methods to get rid of my compulsions along those lines.

Note that it is entirely possible to want to save the world because it makes you feel good, not because the lack of that effort will make you a terrible awful person. I still have my own world-saving mission, though I went through a rather confusing period where I still associated that ideal with the negative compulsions that previously drove it. Took a while to realize I could have the positives of the mission, without needing to make it "serious" in the self-righteous way that I did before.

Wow. I will immediately adopt that. "It's never a forgivable extenuating circumstance if you can see it".

Interesting corollary: if you seem to be stuck, perhaps there's an "extenuating circumstance" you're not seeing - and you ought to look for it, perhaps by trying to simulate a 2nd person perspective.

We choose our standards because we want to win and they help us do that. Judging others by those standards doesn't work the same way unless by doing so you can get them to hold themselves to those same standards. Otherwise your standards are serving an altogether different purpose than the ones you impose on yourself, so it makes sense that they are radically different.

Can we please stop using cryonics as a rationality example? It seems pretty clear to me that a thoroughly altruistic, rational person would not spend their money on cryonics. Signing up for cryonics is only rational if you pass some threshold of selfishness.

If you don't believe me: why does your cryonics example involve someone not signing up their son for cryonics? Why aren't you chiding him for not signing up random other people? Well, because there are better ways to help random other people. You'd only help your son first if (a) he was person you could most efficiently help out in the set of all sentient beings (present and future) or (b) you were selfish. (Not especially selfish by most standards. But you're certainly not treating everyone equally.)

I think that when a task is something you deem that you "should" do -- perhaps something you would feel guilty about for not doing -- then it's already really not the first thing you want to do. Thus, without a lot of self-discipline, an extenuating circumstance is readily accepted. Perhaps too readily -- and there would be the reason for the negative judgement.

Compare this with something that a person is driven to do; something they want to do sincerely so that they would be very stubborn in not accepting any obstacles. (While it could be something they feel they "should" do as well, the feeling when presented with an obstacle is annoyance or anger or despair rather than guilt.)

Thus when someone gives up too easily, I try to temper my frustration and disappointment by accepting that it must not have been a priority for them. As well, when I disappoint myself for not trying hard enough, it is a cue to me to stop feeling guilty and list my priorities more honestly. Somewhere along the way, I assigned more priority to a task than I actually feel -- otherwise I would have tried harder.

Consider any great success, especially unusual success in extenuating circumstances (e.g., being 12). That person just wanted to do it.

As long as holding myself responsible for bad calls doesn't become a ritual where I discharge my obligation by identifying (by hindsight) the first clue that, if more highly weighted, would have led me to victory, I agree: my failures should be examined in case there is anything I can rightly learn from them. When the reasons for an outcome are murky even in hindsight (e.g. investment losses), the risk of wrong learning is heightened.

As applied to willpower (rather than judgment), the argument works - you had better be able to understand and control your own mental state, or else no one will. But I sometimes feel that I need more than self-blame to win over my own laziness.

Editorial suggestion: This post should link to Tolerate Tolerance.

"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.

"to forgive due to extenuating circumstances" = "to excuse".

Mental energy is actually a limiting factor and I believe that this is the cause for more failures than people care to admit. That is, we as humans have a tendency to pick our battles as we have a limited amount of time and thinking resources and as such only invest large amounts of both only on a very small set of descisions. This means that most descisions do get done rather automatically.. which (as has been argued in previous articles) is rather normal. However, I think that a rationalist should be able to determine wether the thing he messed up was something he clearly did without paying it much attention (and thus did as best as he could given his very limited resources of time) or wether he really did invest a lot of consideration into it and just messed up. In both cases, lessons of course need to be learned and priorities adjusted (the fact you did it automatically might need to be corrected so that the next time you WOULD actually think in that situation) but I still believe that we cannot hold ourselves to the highest of rational standards for every single descision we make..

Maybe this is what the original author meant by saying that his mental energy budget is limited. Anyways, I thought that this aspect required further discussion...

A lot of people regard being 14 years old as a valid excuse for not starting your own company. Not Ben Casnocha, though.

I think Ben started his first company with 12, at least that's what I got from the Amazon page of his book.

Edit: From his personal webpage: http://bigben.blogs.com/website/personal.html

"Not counting gumball or pen businesses, I started my first company when I was 12, and my first "real" company (Comcate) at age 14, an e-government software company which serves cities and counties throughout America."

I think not plucking things out of the causal lattice should work both ways.

It's unlikely that a missing right pinky finger would make it really impossible for someone not to be a piano player professionally. There are a million other things, both personal conscious choices and circumstances, that come into play.

But also, Einstein probably would have discovered relativity even if he had taken one extra day off to do something frivolous.

This isn't to say you don't have to make the right choices when opportunities or inspirations present themselves, but even the ambitious 14 year old might have to wait a year before finding the right opportunity.

"When I consider doing less, I consider that this would make me a horrible awful unforgivable person. And then I cheerfully shake hands with others who aren't trying at all to save the world. "

You shouldn't be saving the world so that you don't feel horrible, you should be saving the world so that the world gets saved. Guilt at not saving the world is useless. (and I don't think guilt is actually why you're trying.)

"A true rationalist should win, after all."

How are you defining "win"? Does it mean having the highest level of utility? If so then I don't understand the last part of your post "Incremental Progress and the Valley" in which you advise someone to RUN AWAY from this blog if they don't care about truth and need illusions to preserve their mental well-being.

Mr Yudkowski - stop being so bloody soft hearted! :)

[This is somewhat of a follow-up to my comment on "Whining-Based Communities, in which you discuss Ayn Rand, and I justified her use of the terms Moochers and Looters. I now wish I'd read these two articles in chronological order but, you know, circumstance]

This is precisely why Rand was so vitriolic to the 'Moochers and Looters,' the Excuse Makers. When you start to worry about their extenuating circumstances, when you feel guilty and cover up for their deficiencies, all that's happening is that you're enabling them as they try and steal some of your mental energy. Sure, the self-proclaimed Objectivists might have delusions about how they're special, and society is trying to tear them down, but that doesn't change the fact that along with success comes a gaggle of people who'll attack you indirectly by listing all the reasons that they'll never be as successful as you, and that you ought to feel bad for being better than them.

If it's okay for you to Win, then it's not your fault if they Lose. Pity isn't a noble emotion in and of itself; any more than contempt is inherently ignoble. Both can be either, it all depends on where they're used.

Everybody here shares the goal of building an improved reality, with less fickleness and more justice, but for the time being we're living in a cold and indifferent Universe. Pretending otherwise, making excuses, just exacerbates the problem.

Like Aesop said, "Pity is wasted on the evil," (because the evil are not game theorists).