Mistakes and Rationality

post by InquilineKea · 2011-02-28T00:27:24.541Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 11 comments

So, like all of us, I've made numerous mistakes in my life. And I agree with the cliche belief - that I've learned numerous useful things from these mistakes. Mistakes are often a way for me to "test my social boundaries". And that's important, because many many potentially novel behaviors are behaviors that do test on various social boundaries, and it's important to have some intuition about where these boundaries lie, so that I can be innovative without being offensive (and also so that I can be efficient and waste as little time as possible on unnecessary social formalities). 

Furthermore, past mistakes are often a strong impetus for motivation. I've tried many strategies in the past that simply didn't work. And due to all the valuable time I wasted on them, I always am able to motivate myself by reminding myself of these past mistakes that I'm still very ashamed of (mistakes such as staring at math books for hours and hours on end, while not getting anything out of them).

I've also had the nasty experience to see many of my old friendships end badly. But I've learned in those examples - I've learned how to be better to people, to not expect too much out of them, to try to be appreciative to them and to anticipate what they want, to try to care about them (if possible), and also to see through their numerous white lies. Theoretically, this could have been done if I didn't have friendships that ended badly. But it would have been harder to do without emotional destabilization, since even I am prone to psychological inertia. 

Now, is it rational to make mistakes early on? There are a few things to keep in mind:

(1) Some mistakes have the potential of permanently setting us back in life. My parents, for example, often threatened to force me to get a job, which would have had the very strong potential of setting me back for life. Unfortunately, as someone with both ADD and Asperger's, I simply cannot do a job and learn at the same time, and that happened, I may never be able to go on to graduate school. I am, however, fortunate enough to have parents willing to pay my way through college. If I didn't have that option (and was in the lower classes), then yes, some of my mistakes could have forced me into a perpetual cycle of repetitive low-wage jobs effectively for life. 

And that's the key thing with mistakes. Mistakes can sometimes permanently doom your future, especially if you're in a vulnerable position. Mistakes can also result in permanent social damage, which can be devastating if you're stuck in that group and have few other alternatives. 

(2) Many people have a tendency to overreact to mistakes. Sometimes, they start becoming so overprotective against making future mistakes that they simply don't experiment as much as they used to (and open themselves to much fewer things than before), causing them to miss potentially important stimuli. 

Furthermore, if these mistakes are made in a social setting, there is often significant pressure to overreact to mistakes. Because if you don't become overprotective against future mistakes, people may believe that you're incapable of change. And that perception is a often a very dangerous perception, especially given all the disasters from history that have come from rulers who were truly incapable of change.

(3) It is, of course, often best to learn from the mistakes of others. But the circumstances behind their mistakes is often not as local or as personal as the circumstances behind my mistakes. And so I've had to experience most of these mistakes myself.

What are your thoughts? Is there a finely-defined optimal number of mistakes to make? (for now, I'm actually more interested in the real life implications of this than the AI implications).

This would also be interesting to AI researchers too, since rational agents might also make mistakes while trying to explore "utility space". Some areas will have high local utility, and some areas will have high global utility. With AI, reputation and overreaction certainly matter less. But time (and other) costs still matter, and "mistakes" are often then cases where you spend an extended amount of time in areas of "low local utility", or where you get the utility function wrong, assume that the utility function is applicable in a domain where it actually isn't, or make the wrong decision.

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