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Groups never admit failure

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Re: Groups never admit failure

#71

Post by catsarebetter »

I think it depends on how drastically wrong the group is and if the which sets of individuals in a group that gets attracted to it based on around an idea, mission, value, etc.

Like for example, as soon as meme stocks dive in the next recession, most likely the reddit groups based around this will fall apart because the idea that meme stocks are a great way to make quick money will die.

I think the shape of the group changes, those with more deeply held beliefs about a group will stay and perhaps "regroup", but for most, who get attracted to a particular group for no clear first principles, they will leave and from their perspective, the group has definitely died.

But to use the meme stock example above, those who were in the group because of deeper beliefs that meme stocks signal a shift in retail trading and the rise of the consumer need for financial independence early on tied to the lowered barriers of financial transactions thanks to the internet, they will regroup.

Ok back to work

Re: Groups never admit failure

#72

Post by dragontamer »

HPsquared wrote: post #63
dragontamer wrote: post #54

It took a lot of effort, but Japan's Meiji Era civil war was a big one. The Samurai Class said: "This system is not good, and look over there, battleships from Western Nations are on our shore. Time to modernize and industrialize, and time to retire the Samurai system". Of course, the other half of the Samurai argued otherwise and thus the civil war started. Turns out that the side that chose guns and industrializati…

In that case the group didn't remain intact: it split in two. To use the article's language, it's a group that tried to change its mind then fell apart as a result.

"The Group" was the Tokugawa Shogunate, a group of Samurai who were leading Japan from the 1600s through the mid-1800s.

Some of the Samurai remained pro-Shogunate (the old system of power). The others were pro-Imperialists (Emperor Meiji, Prime Ministers, Bi-cameral house, etc. etc., and other such modernizations).

It was the group that tried to stay on the old Shogunate / Samurai system that lost. In part, because the pro-Imperialists were some of the most powerful samurai of Japan (such as Ito: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%C5%8D_Hirobumi).

In the end, people largely acknowledge the forward thinking of Japan's samurai class. The samurai largely convinced other samurai (through the old system of war / killing each other), that the new Imperial system was better. Turns out that Samurai were still good at fighting, even if they were fighting to remove themselves from power.

------

This is a group that fully acknowledged the inefficiency of the 1600s-era system of government and Feudal territories lorded over by Samurai / Noble warriors.

The pro-imperialist Samurai themselves led the revolution to create a new system of government, industrialization, and open up trade with the world. Yes, even if it meant ending the Samurai powers of old.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#73

Post by clpm4j »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #51

This article reads like an anecdotal rant. > Groups never admit failure. > I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” First statement does not follow from the second. The rest of the article is even worse in its sudden jumps to conclusions.

The author is Naval Ravikant who is a wealthy VC and pseudo-philosopher. He's clearly a smart guy but also seemingly disconnected from reality at this point in his career.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#74

Post by dang »

dredmorbius wrote: post #61
dang wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. I'm not saying you're wrong, but these lead to reliably repetitive and tedious discussion, which is not on topic for a site focused on intellectual curiosity. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... Separat…

Isn't it inconsistent to demand comments refrain from ideological claims where a posted article's raison d'etre is unsupported ideological argument?

I didn't demand that. This is about comment/thread quality. There are certain kinds of post that reliably lead to much lower-quality discussion, and those are the kinds we ask people to refrain from; generic ideological tangents (and generic tangents in general) are a case of this.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#75

Post by brian_cunnie »

> Groups Never Admit Failure

I've been a member of groups that admitted failure. One time a group of us swam through a barnacle-encrusted passageway & cut ourselves. Everyone was bleeding. "That was a mistake," we agreed.

A volunteer group I'm in accept a $150k bequest, and after much soul-searching we decided to return all but $10k. Everyone agreed that we shouldn't have accepted the money in the first place because it caused too much strife in our organization.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#76

Post by fennecfoxen »

overshadow wrote: post #70

> This happens in crypto land, too, where the coins fork You only get hurt when you're holding? Crypto for me was always about not using it as a speculative currency, but actually /using/ it when you could. There's a thing called /spending/ which all the wealthy seem to avoid.

Spending? What's that? Crypto is mostly about the speculative asset bubble and scams. :)

Re: Groups never admit failure

#77

Post by derbOac »

Animats wrote: post #3

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” Now that is a useful insight. It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacin…

I think the essay is strongly written — never is a strong word — but it resonated with me because of a personal experience.

In that experience part of the problem was that those who disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or because they were driven away, or something in between. So there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "surviving" sort of meant staying with the group.

It's interesting to think about how this applies to your WWI examples, where the people in the position of admitting mistake are still alive, and there's a very literal survivorship bias with regard to group membership.

Anyway, when you have an entity that can change in composition, it affects what is involved in admitting to mistakes, because the people making the mistakes might be different from those who would admit to them.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#78

Post by bartread »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #69
Animats wrote: post #3

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” Now that is a useful insight. It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacin…

After a large organization is structured, it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors ("winning", or a change in the context that required the objective in the first place). I would expect an adage about this to already exist – if it doesn't, I'm claiming it. :)

This very topic is covered in Eric Hoffer's book, "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements".

He's talking more about religious and political movements than companies but, with the way many companies today want people to believe in their mission, there are strong parallels.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#79

Post by cabalamat »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #69
Animats wrote: post #3

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.” Now that is a useful insight. It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacin…

After a large organization is structured, it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors ("winning", or a change in the context that required the objective in the first place). I would expect an adage about this to already exist – if it doesn't, I'm claiming it. :)

> it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors

Yes, and also the furtherance of the careers of the top people.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#80

Post by tshaddox »

Seems like this depends on what you mean by "large group." If we're only talking about, say, populations of entire large countries, or all adherents to a major world religion, then sure, it would be very unlikely to get them to literally all agree that some error was made. But that's mostly because it would be difficult to coordinate any behavior that specific across that large of a group of people. If, however, we're just talking about the official leadership or representatives of some large group, then there are plenty of cases of them admitting mistakes. Even big companies and governments occasionally admit mistakes.
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