LINK: Performing a Failure Autopsy

post by fowlertm · 2016-05-27T14:21:27.343Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 3 comments

Contents

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In which I discuss the beginnings of a technique for learning from certain kinds of failures more effectively:

"What follows is an edited version of an exercise I performed about a month ago following an embarrassing error cascade. I call it a ‘failure autopsy’, and on one level it’s basically the same thing as an NFL player taping his games and analyzing them later, looking for places to improve.

But the aspiring rationalist wishing to do the something similar faces a more difficult problem, for a couple of reasons:

First, the movements of a mind can’t be seen in the same way the movements of a body can, meaning a different approach must be taken when doing granular analysis of mistaken cognition.

Second, learning to control the mind is simply much harder than learning to control the body.

And third, to my knowledge, nobody has really even tried to develop a framework for doing with rationality what an NFL player does with football, so someone like me has to pretty much invent the technique from scratch on the fly.  

I took a stab at doing that, and I think the result provides some tantalizing hints at what a more mature, more powerful versions of this technique might look like. Further, I think it illustrates the need for what I’ve been calling a “Dictionary of Internal Events”, or a better vocabulary for describing what happens between your ears."

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