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Groups never admit failure

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Re: Groups never admit failure

#131

Post by renewiltord »

VLM wrote: post #122
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…

> the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10 Its really a popularity problem in that there is a doctrine of "we need something survivable in BVR and active ADA" but we don't like talking about that situation as much as pew-pew A-10s are cool and we always plan to fight the last war where there was no BVR or ADA threat (not after the first few days...) Inevitably we will someday go up against an opponent…

BVR = Beyond Visual Range (37+ km missile)

ADA = Air Defence Artillery (anti-aircraft weapons).

Re: Groups never admit failure

#132

Post by renewiltord »

Symmetry wrote: post #110
derbOac wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

In extreme cases you have evaporative heating of groups where after some major setback all the more moderate members leave and the remainder are on average more attached to the group and more fanatical. This is pretty common to see when religious cults have prophesies that fail to pan out.

The WSJ had a piece many years ago about this happening to the Muslim Brotherhood as the moderate members, who were more visible and accessible, were arrested forcing the group to become more fundamentalist. Found that interesting. "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems..."

I never did validate if that claim about the Muslim Brotherhood stood the test of time but I found the thing interesting in the moment.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#133

Post by renewiltord »

jameslk wrote: post #56

> 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.” Just because the author can't think of an example doesn't make it true. In fact groups of people, typically businesses, admit failure all the time. And i…

If you want to challenge the YC orthodoxy ask if it's worth giving up 7%. I know people who chose to do YC and didn't. And honestly, the YC-attending guys were steered away from the idea that would make them a billion-dollar company. Only when they disregarded the YC advice and moved on could they prosper.

EDIT: Sorry, I'm rate-limited here. Yes, I meant that their current valuation is $1+ billion. They abandoned the path that YC suggested - no success down that road - to get here.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#134

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

dahart wrote: post #81

> 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.” Germany openly regrets Nazis and Hitler. In the US we admit that letting McCarthy run amok was a huge mistake. Globally billions of people admit that we…

> In the US we admit that letting McCarthy run amok was a huge mistake.

Who is this "we" ? I strongly suspect that a large number of those who voted to re-elect the previous president likely incline a little bit in McCarthy's favor. He was anti-commie, anti-leftie, pro-america, and really a model for some parts of contemporary conservatism. Yeah, ok, so a few innocents got hurt, but look ... with all those people in front of McCarthy's committee ... a bunch of them had to be commies, right? No smoke without fire, etc.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#135

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jschveibinz wrote: post #6

I can’t agree more with this post. This brings to mind some Milton Friedman quotes: * Governments never learn. Only people learn. * One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. * He moves fastest who moves alone. * Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own… *…

> Governments never learn. Only people learn.

Ah, that's why conservatives and capitalists alike want corporations classified as people. Otherwise they'd be in the class of "never learners" too.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#136

Post by pessimizer »

The body seems to have been written by GPT-3, but the title and subheadline are a simple, and probably useful truth.

If an organization is wrong about one of its central tenets, it doesn't change that tenet, it splits. This is because if you disagree with one of the central tenets of an organization, you are no longer an guiding member of that organization. Therefore, if an organization of 100 people split because 90 of the people realize that the purpose of the organization doesn't make sense, now you have an organization of 10 people carefully explaining how those 90 never really understood the original purpose, and weren't willing to put in the work.

I think that's the process that strengthens groups, When Prophecy Fails style. Being wrong is a crucible that leaves the group completely composed of members who are only dedicated to the group itself, rather than any external object. The slag, who are hung up on actually being right, get skimmed off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

Re: Groups never admit failure

#137

Post by Spivak »

foobarbecue wrote: post #130

I would replace "never" with "rarely." Patagonia is a good example of a company that admits failure -- they talk alot in their publications about finding ecological, moral, and profitability problems with their practices, describing lessons learned and attempts to improve. I have seen in my work that individual tasks present failures as successes in their final reviews, and I can't think of any examples of a task tha…

This a good point. I think we can refine the rule to something like “groups never admit anything that makes them look bad.”

Patagonia can admit failure because they’ve set it up so that failure is a fine outcome and even the attempt is noble.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#138

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

wussboy wrote: post #55
jschveibinz wrote: post #6

I can’t agree more with this post. This brings to mind some Milton Friedman quotes: * Governments never learn. Only people learn. * One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. * He moves fastest who moves alone. * Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own… *…

But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years. And the advantages of small groups over individuals are so comprehensive they have been a primary source of evolutionary progress in humans. I'm not sure Friedman knew what he was talking about.

> But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a sizable research field devoted to trying to help make human organizations function better (it was most of what used to be called "operations research", but went far beyond the for-profit corporation version of this concept).

For reasons I don't understand, that project appeared to almost completely shutdown by the 1980s, and it's hard to find much evidence that it ever existed today.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#139

Post by arthurofbabylon »

It seems the author is conflating a human social proclivity toward back-slapping/good-jobs with a reluctance to admit failure.

Medium and large groups admit failure all the time, but rarely dwell on it. Instead they adjust and evolve, which is the healthy response to failure.

Consider changes in management, business pivots, board changes, values evolutions, even cultural shifts and generational displacement. These are responses to failure after some form of prior admission to failure, even if slight.

The shiny thing that happens is declarations of victory and praise - so that’s where a lot of attention goes and where even the author has a bias. Admissions of failure are by their own mechanics brief and not very sparkly/shiny/attention-getting.

Re: Groups never admit failure

#140

Post by foobarbecue »

Spivak wrote: post #137
foobarbecue wrote: post #130

I would replace "never" with "rarely." Patagonia is a good example of a company that admits failure -- they talk alot in their publications about finding ecological, moral, and profitability problems with their practices, describing lessons learned and attempts to improve. I have seen in my work that individual tasks present failures as successes in their final reviews, and I can't think of any examples of a task tha…

This a good point. I think we can refine the rule to something like “groups never admit anything that makes them look bad.” Patagonia can admit failure because they’ve set it up so that failure is a fine outcome and even the attempt is noble.

Exactly. The trick is to create an environment and context where it's possible for groups and individuals to brag about their failures (+/- mitigation strategies).
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