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Pursuing Failure to Gain Success

Several people have now told me that the most important thing I have ever said to them is: “If you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and playing far below your level.” -Inadequate Equilibria, Chapter 7

(epistemic status: a new self-modificatory toy I’m playing with; may or may not be useful to people who aren’t me.)

In fall of 2017, I got stung by a wasp for the first time in my life. A day-and-a-half later, I got stung by a wasp for the second time in my life. It was in the same five-foot patch of sidewalk as the first time; I assume there was a nest hidden nearby, although I never explicitly confirmed so.

After those two stings, I became very cautious about moving around near wasps. I’d move slowly, try to avoid crossing their paths, and generally paralyze myself in such a way as to make moving-through-the-world a lot more troublesome during the parts of the year when wasps were common.

By fall of 2018, I’d had enough of that caution. It caused me far more inconvenience than it was worth; being stung by wasps wasn’t that unpleasant, and struggling to bring myself to move in their presence was far moreso. Unfortunately, the behavior pattern persisted, despite my preferences to the contrary. So I thought to myself: well, how can I get rid of this aversion? The obvious way is to get stung by wasps some more, so that I can get used to it and stop my system 1 from treating it as a Big Deal Worth Substantial Effort To Avoid.

Once I formed that plan, I no longer struggled to walk at full speed in the presence of wasps. After all, it was win-win: either I walk at full speed and don’t get stung, in which case things are going exactly how I want them to go, or I walk at full speed and do get stung, in which case I’ll have gained a point of progress towards getting used to wasps and breaking my aversion to them.

And so it was that, by forming the intention to get stung by wasps in order to break my aversion to them, I broke my aversion to them, no actually-getting-stung required. To this day, I’ve never again been stung by one; but I’m sure, whenever it finally happens, it’ll be an exciting moment of my plan finally progressing.

(And, if I weren’t sure of that, then my aversion would come back. It’s an interestingly twisty mental state to inhabit, excitedly looking forward to solving an already-solved problem. But the current solution is unstable, and dependent on continued pursuit of the long-term solution, so ultimately it all works out.)

After solving the wasp problem, I tried to figure out how to extrapolate that solution to other areas. I managed to figure out a generalized form of the solution—given some goal A which one is impeded from pursuing by the fear that pursuit of it will lead to undesired outcome B, convince oneself that pursuit of B will lead to more A in a net-worthwhile fashion, and thereby remove the impediment even if outcome B never actually happens—but I never figured out how to apply it to any other actual problem. It was always just a cool-but-impractical theoretical trick sitting in my arsenal.

As of this past week, though, I’ve finally figured out the missing piece, the key that changes that generalization from cool-but-impractical into an actually accessible self-modificatory tool: replace B with ‘failure’, and note the wide array of situations in which excessive avoidance-of-failure costs more than the avoided failure gains.

I try writing a thing and it comes out badly? Great! That’s helpful practice towards writing better things in the long run, which wouldn’t have happened if I’d been over-cautious about avoiding the failure and not written the thing. I initiate a social interaction that I think might go poorly, over the objections of my social anxiety, and it in fact goes poorly? Great! Every social failure of that sort is another point towards getting used to failures as a thing-that-can-happen-non-disastrously in social interactions, thereby undermining my social anxiety further and making it easier to interact with people. Et cetera.

I haven’t yet had much chance to use this trick, so far. (Making this post now, rather than waiting months-or-possibly-forever until I’ve had more practice, is one such chance.) There’s not much risk of failure in reading through Fate/Stay Night, and that’s been my primary activity of the last few weeks. But I’m doing my best to start using it more, on the margins, and initial results seem pretty promising.

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Lake Attersee - Gustav Klimt

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manipulative people typically have high empathy. its somewhat necessary i think. how are you going to fool people if you cant build a model of their emotions in your head

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i feel like a lot of you are not using the reverse chronological dash and it’s stressing me out tbh

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The brutality of seeing (and hearing!) the seagulls dropping shelled things on the rocks, to break them open...

Also, apparently starfish are these super-predators that are very slow but extremely aggressive and will eat almost anything they can catch. Even sometimes other starfish! There should be an undersea movie where the monster is just a regular starfish, and it's basically the Terminator.

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microwaves should be micrometer-sized, dammit

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Like sometimes in my head I compose a "you kids don't know how good you have it" where I talk about how I've witnessed significant quality/accessibility/price/mortality gains in food, clothing, medicine, cars &tc in my life since the 1980s alone

But let's turn that around on myself – a lot of my sense of an ideal world was inherited from the world I was born into, and a lot of that was based on that coming before statins, cancer treatments, post-Nader car safety, the stigmatization of domestic violence, tobacco understood as a danger, Prozac, modern ideas of psychic trauma, modern medicine re: physical trauma, the post-Vietnam civilianization of paramedics and helicopter medevac, the concept of "addiction rehab", the end of direct involvement in Cold War combat…

In which at each stage of life a lot of people were mortally wrecked, (often in a way that was ultimately accepted as a feature of life) and thus independently of race, class, education, Internet, age-cohort (the boomer bulge) or other factors each stage of competition would be against fewer rivals, tenures would turn over more often, and the installed establishment by necessity had a more memento mori fatalism, had treasured memories of celebrating untimely deaths, etc.

I remember from childhood a "Don't Make Fun of the Bald Girl, She Has Childhood Leukemia Charlie Brown!" thing and the thing was they were trying to establish new norms, she was bald cause she was getting chemotherapy which was novel, before that you just took to bed and died.

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For some reason as a like 5 or 6 year old I got one of those dolls that can pee and I remember being really frustrated that the pee went straight through it and there was no transformation of fluids involved, so I decided to make blueprints for dolls that had an actual digestive system & organs & all that. I was also a fan of Star Wars at the time so this resulted in my mom finding a notebook full of naked Star Wars characters (Yoda & his penis included) that I got in huge trouble for.

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Hot take: the teleological view of romance in YA is significantly more harmful to teens than depictions of sex.

By which I mean: I think it's great to show YA characters' first romances as incredibly important to them, on par with saving the world! That's how it feels when you're a teenager.* But a lot of the time these first relationships are also last relationships - the relationship at the end of the book is the one that the character is in forever.

And that certainly happens in real life, but so much more often that first romance ends, not because one person was toxic or abusive, but because both of them changed so that they were no longer good for each other. If we really think that narratives in fiction can harm people, I think this macronarrative that implies that the only reason a first love can end is one of the worst-case scenarios in a relationship is much worse than showing two characters having sex.

Essentially, life isn't over at 18 or 20 - there's so much more room to grow and change. It's a fictional narrative, but still, there's space for characters to marry people they didn't meet during the Quest; for happy relationships formed during the Quest to fall apart now that the stress of the Quest isn't present; for people to keep going. Everyone marrying people they've known since they were teenagers really reinforces the idea that if you're not happily life-bonded at 22, it is too late. And that's simply not true.

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been seeing discourse about generative ai again with the who nanorimo thing and honestly I don't give a shit whether people think ai art is valid art or ai writing is valid writing because generative ai requires a planet destroying amount of energy so no matter on the artistic merits it's normalization is a leading cause of worsening climate change and that doesn't seem to be likely to change any time soon and for that reason alone I think we should not let it become normalized or accepted

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The thing about fantasy worldbuilding is that verisimilitude and the rule of cool are not enemies. Someone who looks at a pod of flying whales and asks "what do they eat?" is not being a spoilsport – they're engaging with the premise. There are any number of much more serious objections to aerial megafauna than lack of any obvious role in a trophic web that could have been raised if they just wanted to shoot the idea down; a person who wants to know what the flying whales eat is all but explicitly yes-anding the idea. Sure, you might not have an answer at your fingertips, but acting like it's unimaginative for them to have asked is a really fucking weird way to react.

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"people with political commitments I disagree with are all ugly, incompetent, socially unsuccessful virgins' a surprisingly common viewpoint - I mean, in general, given how trivially and self-evidently incorrect it is when talking about any ideology with any sort of real popular base and meaningful political influence whatsoever, but - especially on this website full of people who proudly understand themselves as being aligned against all the powers and potentates of the earth.

Like venture capitalists can afford dieticians and personal trainers (and plastic surgeons). If someone makes eight figures a year it's basically axiomatic that they can get laid if they want to. People whose entire livelihood and self-identity depends on networking and making deals probably get pretty good at it!

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talking with my mother can be fascinating in a "Koko the gorilla has learned enough sign language to communicate the abstract concept of loneliness" kind of way. recently she hit me with "I didn't know you had insomnia, I just thought you always had trouble getting to sleep". and like, obviously that is bewildering nonsense, but what did it mean inside her brain before she let it out? the world may never know

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