[HN Gopher] Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
___________________________________________________________________
Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy
Author : duck
Score : 402 points
Date : 2024-04-02 06:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (longform.asmartbear.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (longform.asmartbear.com)
| hasty_pudding wrote:
| The problem is you don't know if it's a blunder until after.
| titusjohnson wrote:
| Blunders are things you _could_ or _should_ have avoided, had
| you only taken a moment to pause and think.
| CharlesW wrote:
| By "blunders", the author includes both those which can be
| prevented (see section "Preventable blunders") and those
| which can't. This is one of the reasons this article is
| silly.
|
| Next in the series is, "Avoid accidents: 80% of being a good
| driver."
| 317070 wrote:
| To be fair, you could stop calling them accidents.
| "Avoiding collisions" does sound like it will get you to
| 80% of being a good driver.
|
| Like the author, I also play chess, and I could have
| written the same advice. Maybe the charitable take here is
| "Don't worry about long term plans so much, at least until
| you manage to stop making trivial mistakes, evaluated
| looking retro-actively at decisions you made."
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Driving accidents are largely avoidable though.
|
| If you avoid the wheel while tired or with alcohol in your
| system, you'll slash a big part of the risk. Avoid
| conversations in the car, on the phone or with your
| passenger(s), that's even more risk reduced. Keep your
| tires in good shape, your windshield clean, that's even
| better. Finally, if if you practice defensive driving,
| situational awareness, more still accidents can be avoided.
|
| Nothing will of course mitigate _all_ accidents, but there
| are definitely things that make you more or less accident
| prone in traffic.
| iopq wrote:
| That's not applicable to chess. Some blunders are deep and
| neither player sees mate in 10.
|
| The computer immediately sees mate in 10 and calls the last
| move a blunder. The opponent misses the mate in 10 and moves
| elsewhere, the computer puts it as a blunder.
|
| Both players blundered without even seeing a clear win, and
| it would take them an hour of analysis to see the exact
| sequence and prove there's no way to escape it even though
| there are a hundred variations
| rapsey wrote:
| So success is more likely by not being an idiot. Not exactly
| helpful advice.
| rightbyte wrote:
| This effect is why I am like 10 times as effective working 1/10
| as much as in my younger years in my career.
|
| You can only afford to work fast when not in a hurry.
|
| If I also take credit for work I've not done I am probably a
| 1000x dev. Multi year projects shut down in under a hour before
| they became any trouble.
| none_to_remain wrote:
| Creating code is the lowest level of programming.
|
| Deleting code is much more refined.
|
| Preventing code is sublime.
| Jensson wrote:
| This leads to analysis paralysis. Building things helps you
| think clearer.
| otterley wrote:
| I've learned at Amazon that writing about what you want to
| build, and why, and why not do something else - in a way
| that others can clearly comprehend, and before ever
| touching a line of code - helps you think even more
| clearly.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| It really doesn't, unless you've already implemented a
| variation of the thing before.
|
| There is a time for reflection and planning/thinking
| about a given software problem, but you're mostly wasting
| time doing so in-depth before you've done/looked through
| a rudimentary implementation.
|
| Your planned architecture will be worse then the one from
| the person that interated several times while
| introspecting the resulting code, discovering
| misconceptions on the way.
|
| Do note that this initial implementation is only there to
| learn the domain of the software, basically.
|
| The phase can be skipped if you're not really changing
| anything and mostly just reimplement something you've
| done before. At that point, you're not doing something
| new however.
| lioeters wrote:
| > initial implementation is only there to learn the
| domain
|
| I've been trying to do a kind of documentation-driven
| development, where I write a fairly detailed README file
| before I write a single line of code. It hasn't gone as
| smoothly as I imagined, I think it takes practice to get
| more effective - similar to test-driven dev. And it made
| me realize my usual approach is "to think by coding", and
| to explore the problem space with a rough draft of a
| program.
|
| It must be a common approach, as I've heard people say
| "Throw away the first draft." Not only in programming but
| about writing in general. Ah, there's even a term for it:
|
| Throwaway prototyping - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sof
| tware_prototyping#Throwaway...
| exceptione wrote:
| I am interested, is there some public material about this
| method?
| marklar423 wrote:
| It's basically just writing a design document; Google has
| a similar culture.
|
| I suppose if you're not actually showing it to anybody it
| becomes rubber ducking via design document.
| office_drone wrote:
| Commoncog has some blog posts about the process:
|
| https://commoncog.com/putting-amazons-pr-faq-to-practice/
|
| https://commoncog.com/product-development-iterated-taste/
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| While I disagree with this approach in general - manually
| executing a task and following the data flow is the best
| way to understand a new system - I will say that with the
| rise of LLMs, writing documentation, stubs and comments
| first may be the fastest way to bootstrap a new project.
| taneq wrote:
| Maybe it does for some people but based on all of the
| functional specifications I've implemented over the
| years, they are by far the exception. Maybe designing and
| documenting first is OK if it's done by people who've
| already learned how systems work by building and
| maintaining a lot of them, though.
| nradov wrote:
| The documents used in Amazon at that lifecycle stage
| aren't functional specifications. The point is to justify
| launching a few project to management. You should be able
| to clearly explain why it's worth expending resources.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| You don't have to save everything you build. Many times
| I've implemented a feature and felt unsatisfied with it,
| reverted, and built the same thing again.
| high_5 wrote:
| Not necessarily. You might end up just building things on
| top of things spiral which reduces the ability to think
| clearly.
| ambicapter wrote:
| You can build a ton of things and not put them in
| production (to then pay the price of what you built).
| Practice makes perfect then.
| adql wrote:
| Designing does. Building and using it is for confirming or
| revoking any prior assumptions you had about the initial
| design to improve it.
|
| Most of the thinking should be put into designing and then
| revising the design, the "building" should be the simplest
| part.
| appplication wrote:
| Love this, I'm going to steal it
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is this true?
|
| I find creating, then deleting to be more grounding. Explore
| a couple paths and pick the good one, don't just stay home.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Some ideas don't have a good path - they are just going to
| suck time and energy until cancelled. Like, the last one
| I'm thinking of: way out of our core product, there are
| others out there that are pretty good already, it got
| proposed as a "quick win" which was absolutely delusional,
| and the winning argument for why we went ahead and built it
| was that version 2 would do all the extra work that did tie
| it back to our product and made it worth doing.
|
| Sadly, I failed at preventing it, so the team spent more
| than twice as long as (they) predicted to build something
| half as functional and surprise, no v2 will happen.
| worddepress wrote:
| But I am paid by the hour. I make more money if we do the multi
| year project :-). That big fancy project needs someone to lead
| it, eh :-). Now I am up a level on the old CV.
| nocoiner wrote:
| Based on the last thing I read from this guy, I'm surprised he
| didn't include having a spouse, kids or friends on his list of
| avoidable blunders.
| ycombinatrix wrote:
| link please
| chplushsieh wrote:
| Not GP, but perhaps this is the post:
| https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That doesn't say they're avoidable blunders. It says that
| they cost time and energy, and therefore preclude other
| opportunities.
|
| But is having a good marriage a blunder compared to having
| a great career? I don't think he's saying that.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This is such a simplistic, winner-take-all viewpoint.
| Example: having an awesome marriage can open a bunch of
| doors and afford you the time, energy & space to DO a lot
| more things. Same with a family & friends. It must be sad
| to go through life viewing every course of action as work
| that eats limited capacity.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Stop that blundering! https://youtube.com/watch?v=QoSN7oalIec
| djtriptych wrote:
| Thought of chess immediately after seeing the title.
|
| I really do recommend everyone play. There are innumerable
| insights like this that arise (though this may be true of any
| sufficiently complex game).
| intalentive wrote:
| A tattered sign hanging over Chesterton's fence: this way lie
| blunders.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| So it's not "ok to fail" this week?
| Jensson wrote:
| It is ok for others to fail, don't put pressure on them. It
| isn't ok for you yourself to fail, put pressure on yourself, at
| least if you want to outdo others.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| Failure was never alright despite what people claim.
| anon012012 wrote:
| They say "you need to fail to succeed". The key thing is that
| it is not enough to fail, you also have to _reflect_ on why
| you failed, and this is _the reflection_ which has you
| progress.
|
| It is not the failure itself which is progress, it is the act
| of failing, then feeling BAD, and then _thinking_ about how
| not to feel BAD anymore. Failure without feedback is
| pointless failure. (This is the same idea than deliberate
| practice.)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I think that's "fail" in a way that's different from "blunder".
|
| Let's say I'm a programmer. I try an approach. It doesn't work.
| I realize it doesn't work and back out my changes. That's a
| failure.
|
| Let's say instead I try an approach. It' doesn't work. I keep
| trying to force it to work, distorting the overall architecture
| and still leaving an unreliable, unmaintainable mess. _That 's_
| a blunder.
| kevin_nisbet wrote:
| Also luck is probably a much larger factor than most people
| realize. It's not just bad luck leading to failure, but luck
| leading to customers/revenue.
|
| As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter
| too much how good you are.
| onion2k wrote:
| _if no one is competing with you, it doesn 't matter too much
| how good you are._
|
| Temporarily. Once people see you're doing well with no
| competition the competition will spring forth, no matter how
| good you are. If you're also doing things badly those
| competitors will eat your lunch.
|
| That isn't a reason not to launch when your product is very
| basic and scrappy. You don't need to make it good, and
| definitely not perfect. You just need to go fast.
| iopq wrote:
| Unless your first mover advantage lets you just stay there
| for decades. See: PayPal
|
| they have only now been dethroned as the default credit card
| processor despite being awful to work with when I tried to
| integrate their API circa 2010
| toast0 wrote:
| If first mover advantage in internet payment processing was
| important, CyberCash would still be around. I'm pretty sure
| there was another internet payment processor around before
| PayPal too.
|
| Setup was harder, and the integration wasn't the same, but
| it was before PCI, so integrating with CyberCash meant you
| could own the whole payment flow, and have a better
| experience than PayPal, where you send the user off, and
| when they come back, PayPal may not have confirmed payment
| yet.
| iopq wrote:
| Yes, but PayPal was growing off the back of eBay,
| CyberCash never became entrenched to get the first
| mover's advantage
|
| > The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March
| 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the Cybercash assets (except
| for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On
| November 21, 2005 PayPal (already an eBay company)
| acquired VeriSign's payment services, including
| Cybercash.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash
|
| so in a way, PayPal ate a lot of the other payment
| processors
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's possible to make no blunders and still lose. That is not a
| weakness, that's life.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| The general message reminds me of both
|
| "95th percentile isn't that hard to reach"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197 /
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345)
|
| and "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably"
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686997)
| kevmo314 wrote:
| > To win at chess, blunder less.
|
| How to win: don't lose.
|
| C'mon it's not like people actively choose to make mistakes.
| pkulak wrote:
| Sure, but you can choose your play style. I find I'm way more
| likely to win a chess game if I play a few moves of a really
| safe, boring opening, and then just focus on keeping everything
| protected and never extend myself too much until the opponent
| hangs their queen (I'm about 400, so that's actually very
| likely).
|
| If I get creative and come out all aggressive, I hang my queen.
| But the former is boring as hell, which is why I don't play
| chess.
| iopq wrote:
| That's you, when I play aggressive chess the OTHER side makes
| blunders. It will show up as "the other player made a mistake
| so you won" and as an unforced error
|
| of course it's unforced, if we all played perfectly there
| would be no game to play, but the aggression is what showed
| their bad tactical play
| philbo wrote:
| It seems to me that the main difference between chess and
| startups is that in chess you only have one opponent. The more
| opponents you have, the more likelihood that not blundering on
| its own is not sufficient.
| passion__desire wrote:
| I read a blogpost long time ago which said he made more money
| on working on startups which he sold during the bubble economy
| rather than bust. All boats rise during high tide. It is better
| to sell your boat during high tides.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I think that there are at least 10 main differences between
| chess (or other sports) and startups.
|
| It's a very weak analogy.
|
| He does have a few good points though if you disregard that.
| iopq wrote:
| Avoid blundering?
|
| To do that, you need to learn opening strategy, endgame strategy,
| tactics, etc.
|
| This isn't helpful
| voiper1 wrote:
| In amatuer tennis, he would say that indeed you need to learn
| how to play. But you just play and return the ball. You don't
| need anything fancy to make you win. You just keep playing
| until your opponent makes a mistake.
| iopq wrote:
| Just hit the ball back, simple as
| bjackman wrote:
| I think this is very true, I've found the same thing in e.g:
|
| - Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting
| more consistent does.
|
| - Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games,
| getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes.
|
| These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for
| most people it's the right focus.
|
| The corresponding insight for building software is this:
| "Brilliant" ideas for your engineering are probably not the right
| place to invest energy. Instead you are likely to create more
| success by ensuring you have excellent testing, qualification,
| user feedback, monitoring, rollouts, stuff like that.
|
| This also just comes back to investment+return again. If _you_
| think you gave great ideas then that's fine. But if you can keep
| your race/game/project/startup alive and stable then you start to
| unlock extra "passive income" from your teammates having good
| ideas (and the latitude to execute them) and your competitors
| fumbling their opportunities.
|
| So take your ego out of the equation and do the humble stuff
| first. Don't reward your "rockstar programmers", reward the
| person who set up the dashboards and the e2e tests and threw up
| together that spreadsheet of 'most common user complaints'.
| chillfox wrote:
| "These are surely not true when you're at a high level"
|
| I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that
| avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of
| level in most things.
|
| I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of
| the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.
| voiper1 wrote:
| >This observation applies only to amateur tennis. In
| professional tennis it's just the opposite: 80% of the
| rallies are won rather than lost, as unforced errors are
| infrequent. This is true in chess as well, as high-level
| players don't blunder, and thus it really is that litany of
| other skills that results in high standings.
|
| I think this means at a high level, you're already not
| blundering. So you need to actually do something MORE in
| order to win. You need to force your oponent to lose, and not
| just play "OK" and wait for them to make a mistake.
| AdamN wrote:
| Although pros do still make clear errors and even misses
| that may not be classed as an error (but are at the
| professional level) might outweigh the brilliant shots when
| it comes to the win. I suspect this is why some games are
| 'best of'. The real aficionados sense a low error rate and
| then it's more purely about the big, brilliant plays - and
| that's not a common event.
| harry8 wrote:
| French Open tennis. Seems like the winners, (eg Rafa Nadal
| who has one of the greatest sporting records in any sport,
| anywhere there), consistently hit ground strokes from the
| baseline, back over the net and deep enough in play. From
| that point the opponent self-destructs.
|
| Ok differs from wimbeldon where guys play Hamlet while
| playing in the final (Kyrios, Becker, McEnroe, etc. etc.) and
| can win doing it with outrageous aggression and magic
| winners, but the French Open is certainly "High Level" Rafa
| at the French? How many matches was his longest winning
| streak? 36 matches, 5 titles in 6 years? Unfathomable
| sustained excellence.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| I don't follow tennis closely enough to understand the
| difference. What makes the eventual winners at Wimbledon
| play more aggressively than at the French Open? Is it due
| to the environment (clay or grass perhaps) or some sort of
| cultural thing?
| I_ wrote:
| Grass is faster, meaning for any given shot over the net
| you have less time to respond. This encourages attacking
| behaviour.
|
| Clay is slower, meaning even off fast, angled, difficult-
| to-reach shots the ball bounces higher and slower,
| meaning you have time to get to it, thus prolonging
| rallies and points.
|
| But beyond that, it's not just that players choose to
| play more aggressive on grass - a given shot _is_ more
| aggressive on grass.
|
| This is why the serve is more powerful on grass - you
| open the point with a powerful shot, and on grass that's
| harder to return.
|
| See rally length differences here:
| https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1246341537753006082
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Fascinating! Thanks for the explanation.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I'd go even farther than that and suspect that in many areas
| avoiding blunders gets more important climbing to higher
| levels.
|
| Just the other day I explained this to my daughter:
|
| In our school system a 1 is the best grade a 6 the worst.
|
| Maintaining a 2.0 average is kind of easy. When you blunder
| and get a 3, all you have to so is getting a 1 eventually to
| compensate.
|
| Maintaining a 1.0 average is much, much harder, because you
| have to write 1s consistently without any exception and no
| way to fix a blunder(*).
|
| In many systems there is a hard ceiling of what you can
| achieve. When your performance is measured as an average,
| this makes the system more unforgiving for blunders the
| closer you are to the ceiling.
|
| _(*) Technically, in our school system this is not entirely
| correct, because I think you could theoretically get 0.7s.
| The overall point still stands, because there is a hard and
| positive limit._
| djtango wrote:
| Watch any top tennis game and unforced errors and %age first
| serves often tells the story of the match
| roenxi wrote:
| > These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but
| for most people it's the right focus.
|
| It is trivially true at all levels - anything that leads you to
| lose a game can be construed as a mistake, so if you make no
| mistakes and you lose then the game has been solved (which
| Chess has not been) or was unwinnable. The mistakes just get
| smaller and fewer and fewer people can recognise them.
| SenHeng wrote:
| A good example would be Elizabeth Swaney[0] who somehow found
| her way into the 2018 Winter Olympics simply by showing up at
| qualifying.
|
| _In order to qualify for the Olympics, athletes needed to
| place in the top 30 at either a FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup
| event or FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, and score a
| minimum of 50.00 FIS points.[9] Swaney achieved this by
| attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,[6]
| with one event in China having fifteen (in which she placed
| thirteenth). Thirteen of her top 30 finishes were a result of
| her showing up, not falling, and recording a score_
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Swaney
| sitkack wrote:
| This has been my analysis of high level competition as a
| whole. It isn't about who is the best, as in peak
| performance. It is about consistently making the least amount
| of mistakes.
|
| You can break records, or you can out de-mistake the
| competition.
| petsfed wrote:
| I disagree categorically with this.
|
| In baseball, the team that commits the most unforced errors
| tends to lose the game, but the team that scores the most
| runs _always_ wins.
|
| Usain Bolt doesn't have 8 gold medals and 3 world records
| because he has perfect form (I just learned that he has
| scoliosis, leading to "imperfect" form, whether that made
| him faster or slower than he would otherwise be is
| apparently a subject of some debate), but because he's
| _fast_. It is frequently the case that the best at
| something _defines_ "perfect" form. And anyway, Bolt
| doesn't run marathons, because he cannot sustain _that_
| kind of performance for 2 hours.
|
| I hear what you're saying, I can't count the number of
| times I've seen truly bonkers tricks in freestyle skiing
| and snowboard competitions, from people who screwed up
| their 2nd or 3rd run, or couldn't stitch together a
| coherent run around that one trick, and so came in near the
| middle of the rankings. But the winners were not
| significantly less impressive, just blunder-free. A lot of
| time, the winners were the peak performers moment-to-moment
| but sustained that performance for much longer.
| spennant wrote:
| In other words... being Iceman is better than being
| Maverick.
| sotix wrote:
| > Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting
| more consistent does.
|
| I think this is absolutely true at the lower levels, but once
| you hit a baseline of consistency, the faster drivers do win
| races by simply being faster. It can be maddening them trying
| to recreate their line but still being an entire second per lap
| slower. But when racing closer to the beginner level, simply
| being able to complete every lap at a consistent pace does
| indeed put you at a massive advantage over others.
| lelanthran wrote:
| In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level.
|
| For auto racing (whether sim or real), the #1 rule has always
| been "To finish first, first you must finish", which, as I
| see it, is a direct "make no blunders before worrying about a
| podium finish".
| lgas wrote:
| > In the context of startups, everyone's at beginner level.
|
| Why would this be true? There are plenty of startup
| veterans that have been doing it for years.
| adql wrote:
| Yeah but getting consistent is the bar you need to get to
| first before you can even be considered decent.
|
| Being 1s faster than everyone best lap but having ~2s lap-to-
| lap inconsistency will make you lose every time.
| dgunay wrote:
| A similar dynamic bears out in a lot of games. For example,
| in most RTS games, you win at lower levels by simply out-
| macroing your opponent. Only when you are on equal footing
| later do tactics and strategy become important, despite those
| ostensibly being the core focus of the genre.
| blastro wrote:
| In golf, reducing bogies helps more than increasing birdies, so
| same idea there
| sakras wrote:
| A famous Super Smash Bros player, when asked for advice, would
| always respond with "Don't get hit". Seems this principle of not
| blundering has wide-reaching applications!
| nxobject wrote:
| That is surprisingly true: knowing nothing about Smash, I
| sometimes get roped into playing it at parties. I've managed to
| do respectably well, knowing nothing about special powers or
| any of the controls beyond navigating and jumping, simply by
| dodging like crazy and not getting hit.
|
| I don't even bother attacking. It annoys everyone.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| I've been discovering this is also very true for Elden Ring.
| Most of my deaths in the game are from being greedy and wanting
| to get in one more hit, but winning tough fights is almost all
| about avoiding getting hit.
|
| And I agree, I think the idea of avoiding losing is better than
| "trying to win" in many cases. Like with health and fitness, it
| would be very hard to identify what the right action to "win"
| would be (what does win even mean?). But it is much easier to
| do the things that keep you from losing. Don't eat poorly,
| don't be inactive all the time, and so on. The avoidance
| approach won't have you reaching the Olympic level, but you'll
| be doing a lot better than most.
| spxneo wrote:
| this is the greatest article i ever read on HN in the past 12
| years i been coming here
| irjustin wrote:
| "Product Market Fit" that's it - #4 in the article.
|
| Few startups fail due to #1-3 after achieving #4. So many
| startups blame #1-3 because they couldn't find #4. If you don't
| have PMF, you're burning cash, pivoting, arguing (founder
| disputes) to figure out your way there. All #1-3.
|
| PMF is incredibly hard and don't let anyone fool you.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| "If you're asking yourself 'Do I have PMF?' then you don't have
| it"
| asah wrote:
| Sorry but no: I've seen lots of great companies die from #1-3
| and competitors copy the PMF product and win.
|
| One of my saddest investments was an amazing company gummed up
| in co-founder squabbles too far gone to recover, even while the
| product was growing like weeds. Company died in lawsuits and
| walkaways. Another was pre-PMF and ran into this, I learned
| from the previous experience and jumped in and helped them keep
| the band together. They found PMF the next year and off to the
| moon ($1M ARR, 100% QoQ growth, 36 months that, <6 months to
| truly profitable).
|
| I have lots of examples of all 3 and more. It's all 100x easier
| than PMF but if you don't do FIRST then you don't get to work
| on PMF.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| A better way to read this is "80% of a not losing strategy". The
| author agrees with this but buries the lede at the very end of
| the piece:
|
| _" Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The
| rest of the game does matter."_
|
| I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the
| default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or
| have higher chances) if you don't blunder.
|
| The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event,
| which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the
| overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit?
|
| _" An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that
| customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She
| sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor
| only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-
| order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-
| quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting
| the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the
| competition._"
|
| https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/
|
| The only time this is a winning strategy is if survival has
| compounding effects. For startups, they tend to be default dead.
|
| This memo by Howard Marks explores the case when survival is
| actually a winning strategy:
|
| _" If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of
| themselves"_
|
| https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or...
|
| Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it
| the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context.
| salamo wrote:
| > The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail
| event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact
| on the overall probability.
|
| Maybe you could compare it to playing chess against a much
| higher rated player. In that sense, minimizing your weaknesses
| is still useful. And looking at the "blunders" the author lists
| we can definitely say that making these errors is worse than
| not making them.
|
| One place where this analogy breaks down is that chess is a
| zero-sum perfect information game. Business is neither zero-sum
| (competition can encourage innovation and better products) nor
| perfect information. In chess, we can calculate for each of the
| candidate moves and have theoretically perfect knowledge of the
| future state of the board. In business and many other
| situations, this kind of thing isn't possible. The upshot is
| that several of the "blunders" the author lists may only turn
| out to be blunders after the fact.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Yes I know it's useful. The last line of my comment said
| that: _" Reducing blunders is obviously good in any
| situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always
| depends on the context"_.
|
| "is it useful?" usually isn't a very interesting question,
| because a lot of things are obviously useful and yet don't
| have much of an impact on results.
| smatija wrote:
| When playing against much better player there are two
| possible strategies in practice:
|
| 1. try to simpifly position as much as possible and hope for
| a draw (and inevitably lose the endgame due to playing too
| passively);
|
| 2. complicate position so much that neither you nor your
| opponent can calculate or understand it, then hope that your
| opponent will mess up before you will.
|
| Take from that what you will.
| darkerside wrote:
| Have to agree with this sentiment, and I'm surprised it's not
| getting more traction. If startups are like chess, they are
| like very low level chess because the game was just invented.
| Nobody knows what a blunder is yet, many will go undetected,
| and worrying about playing perfect chess will probably outrun
| your runway.
| smartbear wrote:
| As the author of the article, I really like your counter-point
| here.
|
| Because I do agree -- in all startups most "stuff" is being
| executed poorly (if at all), with issues everywhere, and yet
| when you get the right 1-2 things _really_ right, that can
| overwhelm all those problems.
|
| So, perhaps the charitable view is that this piece is a fun way
| of getting at the usual ideas of things which derisk a startup
| -- e.g. talking to customers rather than coding in a hole --
| and indeed many of these things will surely be a net-positive.
|
| And yet, the "80% of winning" might indeed be correct for
| amateur chess and amateur tennis, yet it's not "80%" for
| startups, and that bit is rhetorical.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Once he started talking about chess, I knew it was going to be a
| limited view on things.
|
| There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very
| badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly.
|
| I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same
| reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid
| oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how
| to exploit an opportunity when it arrives.
|
| So in the end, you have to know which game you are currently
| playing. Some things require "the devil is in the details", and
| other things you can just fix problems when they arrive (because
| those problems won't kill your overall progress)
|
| I would argue that startups are more playing the 'exploit
| opportunities' game and not the 'cover all your bases' game.
|
| For example, a startup shouldn't cover all legal aspects or
| risks. In the end, when you are generating enough revenue, you
| can deal with earlier legal mistakes. There are plenty of
| examples.
|
| When your startup is not exploiting opportunities, no "cover all
| legal aspects" is going to save it.
| blowski wrote:
| I don't understand your distinction between types of games. In
| Chess, your stupid mistake creates an opportunity your opponent
| can exploit. The failure to exploit an opportunity is itself a
| mistake.
|
| I guess in Poker there is an element of luck of the deal - is
| that the kind of opportunity you're talking about?
| gizmo wrote:
| In Poker it isn't so much about how many hands you win or
| lose, it's about creating big pots when you have good hands
| and small pots otherwise. That's how good poker players can
| profitably play bad cards (that are statistically unlikely to
| make good hands).
|
| In chess the table stakes are always the same. One point for
| a win, half a point for a draw. To win consistently at chess
| you have to play the openings carefully, play the mid game
| strategically, and grind out all the end games. Sloppy
| players who occasionally make brilliant moves don't get
| anywhere in chess, because a brilliant sequence of moves will
| only earn you a single point while small mistakes will still
| result in full point losses.
|
| In cash game poker you can play sloppy but when you see the
| opportunity win a huge pot that makes up for all the mistakes
| and then some.
|
| Tournament poker is a bit more like chess. Successful
| tournament poker players win by grinding out small victories
| over the course of many hours.
| blowski wrote:
| So it's thinking about the opportunity at the level of
| tournament and ladder, rather than individual games.
| koonsolo wrote:
| The distinction is how much a mistake gets punished. In
| chess, a tiny oversight might lose you the game ("Oops I
| didn't saw you could take my queen").
|
| In poker, a huge mistake like "whoops I dropped my cards
| accidently open on the table" is "let's not bet this round"
| as if nothing happened.
|
| Let me give you some real life examples so you can spot the
| difference.
|
| Security always falls into the "don't make any mistakes"
| category. A small oversight might jeopardise your entire
| system. Some back door was open and nobody realised it.
| Whoops!
|
| In startups, like I mentioned, when you solve a critical
| problem for customers, your UX can be terrible, your
| production can be inefficient, your product can be full of
| bugs. If your product solves a critical problem, it's still a
| big win for your customer, even though all the rest is
| terrible. This is exploiting an opportunity.
|
| In sports, take basketball for example, the game is much more
| forgiving with mistakes compared to something like
| gymnastics. In basketball, a missed shot or a turnover isn't
| the end of the world; you have multiple opportunities to
| recover and score points throughout the game. However, in
| gymnastics, a slight misstep or a fall during a routine can
| severely impact your overall score, leaving little room for
| recovery.
|
| You could also look at investments for example. In stock
| trading, especially day trading, a single mistake can lead to
| significant financial loss, especially if leverage is
| involved. It's a game where covering all bases and being
| cautious of every move is critical. On the other hand,
| venture capital operates more on the principle of exploiting
| opportunities. Venture capitalists invest in several startups
| knowing well that most will fail, but a single successful
| investment can cover for all losses and bring substantial
| profits.
|
| In the end, knowing which game you're playing is essential. I
| see plenty of people trying to cover all bases when in
| reality it's the opportunity that really matters. If your
| personality is one more than the other, you can take a
| profession that leans into your strength.
| pratclot wrote:
| I really like this comment, chess sucks.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time
|
| In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact
| definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one
| example from the Lichess UI:
|
| https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde6438...
|
| Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning
| probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder.
| But winning probability is a nonlinear function of stockfish
| centipawns. A drop in 100 centipawns when you're up 15 points
| isn't a blunder. When the game was equal, it is.
|
| Point is, by the time you know it's a blunder you already know
| something about the outcome of that move, that it swung the
| winning probability by more than 14%. So the analysis is kind of
| just measuring some function of winning probability and saying
| that it is highly correlated with winning probability.
| matsemann wrote:
| Also, getting better changes what a blunder is. When I began,
| hanging my queen was a blunder. Then allowing a discovered
| check was a blunder. Then allowing the threat of a future
| discovered check affect my move is a blunder etc.
| smatija wrote:
| These evaluation-centric definitions of blunder are a bit
| awkward though.
|
| Traditionally blunders were defined in more player-centric way:
| player blundered, when he made a mistake obvious enough, that a
| player of his strength is very unlikely to make. So what is a
| blunder for a strong player may merely be a mistake for a
| weaker player.
|
| Problem with evaluation-centric definition is that not all
| moves that worsen position by 14% are equally obvious - if you
| hang a queen in one that is certainly a blunder, if you miss a
| non-trivial sacrificial combination on the other hand...
| salamo wrote:
| Chess.com is also definitely using an evaluation-centric
| definition to label moves as blunders. The issue is that this
| definition is also some function of the change in winning
| probability.
|
| > So what is a blunder for a strong player may merely be a
| mistake for a weaker player.
|
| Statistically this intuition appears to be correct. Your
| winning probability is still more than 25% when down a queen
| against an 800 rated player, but under 10% if playing a 2200:
| https://web.chessdigits.com/articles/when-should-you-
| resign#...
|
| So it would make sense for the definition to take into
| account the opponent's Elo rating.
| smatija wrote:
| I agree - all attempts at automatic classification of
| blunder have same problem. This is why analysing games
| without engine still matters and is going to matter for
| foreseable future.
|
| Don't forget also impact of time control - shorter games
| lead to more mutual mistakes. While in 90+30 first big
| blunder should decide the game, in blitz it's just the
| beginning.
|
| Amusing example is Chessbrah speedruning to 2000, while
| hanging queen in every game:
| https://www.twitch.tv/videos/593176969
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Maybe a better analogy would be card counting in Blackjack.
|
| To be profitable (if it can be), card counting works with
| extremely tight margins, like a fraction of a percent per hand.
| It only turns a profit averaged out over many hands.
|
| But if you make a basic strategy blunder, you can lose the
| statistical benefits of maybe hundreds of perfectly played
| hands. That's why it may be better to play a simple strategy
| perfectly, than a more advanced but error prone strategy.
|
| That's also the reason why casinos love wannabe card counters.
| Their strategy may work in theory, but because of mistakes, the
| end result is worse for the player than playing basic strategy.
|
| Note about basic strategy: it is the optimal way of playing
| blackjack assuming each card draw is independent (so, no card
| counting), it is simple, and widely available and accepted in
| casinos. The player is at a loss (of course), but reasonably
| so. If you can play basic strategy consistently, you are better
| off than the vast majority of players.
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I feel ignorant, I thought with card counting you were still
| pretty much playing the simple strategy but altering bet
| sizes as your expectations of winning increased?
| chiyc wrote:
| It can also involve deviations in strategy based on the
| count, particularly with borderline hands.
| Cushman wrote:
| Your understanding is correct, more or less[0], but there
| are two parts to strategy: an inexpert counter is likely to
| be distracted, and to make errors from perfect play.
| They're also likely to lose the count, and make errors in
| bet sizing. The net of those is worse than a non-counter
| playing perfectly, whose edge is slightly negative but who
| still stands a decent chance of making money on a given
| day.
|
| But note that's a reason for casinos not to _overtly_
| discourage counting; they'll still happily ban a player who
| is apparently counting well rather than roll the dice on
| whether they're counting "well enough".
|
| [0] Sibling points out that counters will make specific
| deviations from "naive" perfect play depending on the
| count, but that's to push earnings up a bit on an already
| positive edge. There's also the element of camouflage,
| where a _really_ strong counter might deviate in ways that
| don't hurt their earnings but make their play look less
| "counter-y".
| hehhehaha wrote:
| Ya but simple mistakes can turn +ev to -ev, and if you
| miscalculate and scale up on -ev, then that can wipe out
| your +ev for hours
| Certhas wrote:
| It's not tautological, though. Your position can gradually
| deteriorate until it is not salvageable anymore. In that
| situation we say that the opponent outplayed you.
|
| The fact that the switches in probability occur suddenly is
| highly relevant. One reason for this could be, that you are
| able to avoid this type of mistake 90% of the time. So during 9
| out of ten moves, nothing changes. Then it does. So in this
| model, avoiding blunders means honing your skills to be able to
| apply all aspects of your mistake knowledge all the time. In
| another game, that is less blunder driven, it might be better
| to focus on getting more things right most of the time, rather
| than getting fewer things right all of the time.
|
| At this level, chess is a tactics game. Not a strategy game.
| Retric wrote:
| It's an issue of how the games are evaluated. At most skill
| levels a human being slowly outplayed is trading blunders
| from a computer's perspective.
|
| For a 1400 a game where an 800 crushed a 500 is most likely a
| comedy of errors. For a GM that 1400 crushing a 1100 will
| similarly be filled with missed opportunities. And for a top
| chess engine on significant depth, most games are practically
| a slapstick comedy because the best of the best represent
| such a small fraction of overall players.
| anamexis wrote:
| I don't think that's true. Speaking as someone sub-1000
| rated who plays lots of other people in the same region,
| the computer evals don't typically show a series of
| blunders. 1 or 2 blunders per game is common, but blunder-
| less games are also not uncommon. Just lots and lots of
| suboptimal but not terrible moves.
| chongli wrote:
| They may be referring to sub-1000 online rated. An 800
| FIDE rated player is going to wipe the floor with an 800
| chess.com rated player.
| anamexis wrote:
| If anything that reinforces my point that low-rated
| players aren't losing in a series of constant blunders.
| chongli wrote:
| If you're 800 FIDE rated over the board you're not going
| to be 800 online. You'll be way above that. I haven't
| played in years but I was beating 1200 rated players
| online as a total beginner. The ratings are not
| comparable.
|
| A sub-1000 online rated player is frankly a very poor,
| total beginner at chess, not an enthusiastic club player.
| anamexis wrote:
| No argument there, but that has nothing to do with my
| point that novices at chess aren't just playing constant
| blunders when playing each other.
| Retric wrote:
| If you're rated 800 online and making 1-2 blunders per
| game playing blitz, that seems low and it still adds up
| to 2-4 in a given game.
|
| If you mean longer time controls then that's definitely
| helping, but most games are 5 minutes or less simply
| because players are going to be able to fit far more such
| games per day. Similarly the average rating is quite low
| simply because everyone starts terrible and most people
| quit relatively quickly.
| anamexis wrote:
| I'm talking about daily/correspondence games.
| Retric wrote:
| Ok, 1-2 blunders are more believable in that context, and
| uhh ouch. Anyway, it's still an extreme edge case which
| says nothing about most games.
| anamexis wrote:
| My point was that it's not an extreme edge case, it's
| quite common, even at the 700-1000 chess.com ELO level.
| Retric wrote:
| Someone dying in a car accident is frequent/common as in
| happening several times a day, but it's still an extreme
| edge case in terms of the average trip.
|
| If we're talking about the average game you simply need
| to look at all time controls to get an accurate
| understanding not pick an uncommon example and
| arbitrarily suggest it's representative of the general
| case.
| anamexis wrote:
| Do you have better data, or are you just being an
| asshole?
| Retric wrote:
| > Do you have better data, or are you just being an
| asshole?
|
| Last I checked, 55% of games on chess.com are 5 minutes
| or less if that's what you're asking. But at this point
| I'm just done with this conversation.
|
| Also, average account ELO was ~800 not sure if that's
| active or just not banned.
| chongli wrote:
| That's position-dependent. In one case you might be in a
| totally closed position where there's no obvious way forward
| and your position gradually deteriorates. In another case you
| might be in an ultra-sharp, open position where you miss some
| crazy sacrifice combination that leads to mate-in-10.
|
| The first example is clearly a strategic defeat and the
| second a tactical defeat. But calling it a "blunder" to miss
| the sacrifice in such a sharp position feels unfair. You
| might have been walking a tightrope for a long time to reach
| that point and then made one little slip any grandmaster
| could be expected to make.
| indymike wrote:
| I once watched a volleyball game between my high school's
| vaunted multi-time state champion team and a small private
| school. It was a perfect example of no blunders vs. gradual
| deterioration. Our team played an aggressive style that would
| test the opponent's physical ability and mental toughness.
| The small private school played no-mistakes, all defense, and
| no offense. They would dig up everything in bounds and return
| the ball. They only scored when our team hit the ball out of
| bounds. That game took four hours, and the only reason the
| small team lost was depth: they only had one substitute.
| Eventually, they wore out and just couldn't physically
| perform.
| sjducb wrote:
| The point is that you are in control of whether you blunder or
| not. It's more important to avoid obvious mistakes than to have
| a good strategy.
| mtsyh wrote:
| Chess.com is more sophisticated than this in the treatment of
| blunders. They are divided into "misses" and "blunders".
|
| In my experience, it appears that the difference between the
| two is that a "miss" is something the computer evaluates as
| unreasonable or difficult for a human to find. If you had found
| it, it would have been deemed a "brilliant" move, which is
| another analysis move type that chess.com has doesn't have.
| Either that or a miss is failing to capitalize on an opponent's
| blunder.
|
| It makes sense to chess players, since we consider missing an
| opportunity to capitalize on an opponent's mistake to be
| distinct from unilaterally making one's own position worse,
| even though to lichess those are going to both look like drops
| in the evaluation score.
| smatija wrote:
| Chess.com isn't really more sophisticated than lichess - it's
| only trying to appear so.
|
| It's definition of blunder etc is still based only on engine
| evaluation. For example it marks as briliant all sound
| sacrifices, even the most routine ones. This is good
| marketing, but I doubt it's good analysis.
| philipov wrote:
| It might be tautological, but it also happens to be correct!
| The Pareto rule applies: A beginner progressing to intermediate
| might quickly iron out the biggest blunders and by the time
| they're advanced get 80% there, but mastering that last 20%
| requires decades of practice.
| incorrecthorse wrote:
| > In some sense this is almost tautological.
|
| Yes. The interesting property would be the reverse proposition:
| what percentage of victories are granted by not blundering?
|
| In amateur level chess, that number is very high. That's the
| point the author was trying to make.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| This goes back to the medieval idea of via negativa, defining
| through negations. Interesting it worked out for you.
| salamo wrote:
| As a side note, I think this blunder-centric approach to chess is
| underappreciated, especially at low to mid levels where the vast
| majority of players peak. In addition to working on tactics,
| players should also specifically work on not blundering.
|
| What this means in practice would be something like an "anti-
| tactic". In normal tactics, we need to find the best move which
| will usually win the game or give a decisive advantage. But an
| anti-tactic is a fight with your intuition: you want to make a
| move but that move is actually a blunder. There are several
| correct answers but one or two attractive but very wrong answers.
|
| Of course the "rest of the owl" is how to determine which moves
| are very attractive to certain players. That is something I am
| working on now.
| scotty79 wrote:
| But the blunders are where all the fun is.
|
| Apart from them, games are boring mechanistic jobs.
|
| If the enemy doesn't blunder I start to blunder as I'm getting
| more and more bored with the game.
|
| If enemy plays bad I also get bored and blunder.
|
| Anything to put the spark back into the activity that was
| supposed to be engaging.
| zheng_qm wrote:
| It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have
| gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying
| to be very intelligent.
|
| -- Charlie Munger
| joss82 wrote:
| This only works where the number of moves is finite, and you can
| only iterate in lockstep with your opponent: tennis and chess are
| good examples.
|
| If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors
| to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make
| as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead.
|
| A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.
| vaylian wrote:
| > you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you
| possibly can, to get ahead.
|
| The tricky part is not getting ahead in the wrong direction,
| because that could be a blunder if the strategy behind that
| move is not well thought through.
| smartbear wrote:
| (Author of the article)
|
| I agree with your counter-point. The finiteness and lock-step
| are interesting characteristics; I wonder what the set of
| characteristics are, for when this "rule" is especially
| applicable.
|
| And then we could ask: Is a startup like that? Are some kinds
| of businesses like that, but some are not? (e.g. a one-person
| accounting service vs a "change the world" startup?)
|
| I do agree that often with startups it's whether you find the
| 1-2 things that REALLY matter, and execute those REALLY well.
| joss82 wrote:
| It's a bit like trying to know if a geometric series is going
| to converge to 0 or diverge towards infinity.
|
| If a blunder is a 0, then avoiding blunders is super
| important.
|
| For example if you are in finance or accounting, commiting
| fraud makes you lose your license and set your business value
| to zero.
| max_ wrote:
| It is easier to avoid errors and accidents than it is to be good
| at emergency room surgery.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Any good coach will tell you to spend the majority of your time
| honing the fundaments, in any sport or competitive activity. This
| is a big part of why.
| gizmo wrote:
| The author seems to be at Elo 1100. At this level players don't
| think even a single move ahead and blunder their queen every
| other game. Slightly better amateur players realize that they
| should trade pieces once they're ahead to get to a winning end
| game.
|
| Avoiding blunders only works at chess at the lowest levels. It's
| the same for tennis. Complete amateurs can win just by returning
| the ball but at higher amateur levels you will have a bad time if
| you try this.
| ozim wrote:
| Article is not about becoming a pro - it is about creating a
| company that doesn't fold like most of companies.
|
| Most startup companies are run by amateurs and that is advice
| for amateurs.
|
| People who have experience already stuff that is in article ;)
| noxvilleza wrote:
| It's "Elo", not "ELO" (it's not an acronym).
| gizmo wrote:
| You're right. Fixed.
| iknownothow wrote:
| I get your point but in your analogy don't you think startups
| should be considered amateur chess players rather than experts?
| "Forced errors" are a thing in chess and tennis but I don't see
| that applying to startups. I can see Apple, Microsoft and other
| big companies playing chess through lobbyists and lawsuits but
| I think the article was about startups.
|
| P.S. I've never founded a company or have any experience with
| it.
| gizmo wrote:
| Your local pizzeria will probably do well by just not
| blundering. If the pizzas, location, decor, menu, and staff
| are good enough then the place will do reasonably well. If
| you do everything right as a pizza place you survive, if you
| blunder you go bankrupt. On the flip side, they don't have to
| do anything original. Just doing OK in all dimensions is the
| winning strategy.
|
| Software isn't like that. It lives in the right tail of the
| distribution. You can blunder everything except product and
| still do extremely well, because software costs nothing to
| produce. Your gross margins are 95%. You can blunder left and
| right and it doesn't matter when people like your product and
| pay for it. Mistakes that would destroy any other low margin
| business you can shrug off.
|
| A pizza place is a local business. They differentiate
| themselves from other pizza places by being closer to you.
|
| Software is global. Your tiny startup competes with open
| source, big tech, and everything in between. If your product
| is mediocre you'll struggle or fail (and rightly so). If your
| product is great you get a fire hose that spews money.
|
| In basically every interview with successful founders they
| joke about the giant mistakes they made (that ended up just
| not mattering). The kind of blunders that destroy any other
| business are no big deal in software. The article is wrong
| and the lesson should be the opposite.
| arduanika wrote:
| Sure, and he makes this point right there in TFA:
|
| "This observation applies only to amateur tennis. In
| professional tennis it's just the opposite: 80% of the rallies
| are won rather than lost, as unforced errors are infrequent.
| This is true in chess as well, as high-level players don't
| blunder, and thus it really is that litany of other skills that
| results in high standing."
| gadders wrote:
| Eric Sink from Source Gear made a similar point in a 2005 (I'm so
| old) essay explaining competition and business topics to
| developers via sports/game metaphors:
|
| https://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html
|
| "The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you
| can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot
| of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard.
| The problem with this strategy is that a slam is a high-
| risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly
| score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you
| do it wrong, you give your opponent a point.
|
| Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong
| player. I can slam the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do.
| I can beat most other players by simply returning every shot with
| a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard simply isn't necessary.
| All I need to do is wait for the other player to make 21
| mistakes.
|
| How software is similar
|
| You can beat a lot of competitors by simply not beating yourself.
| Most companies go out of business because of their own stupid
| mistakes, not because of the brilliance or strength of their
| competitor. Stay conservative, and stay in business. Watch the
| years go by, and you'll be surprised how many of your competitors
| come and go."
| npteljes wrote:
| Very good metaphor. I score similarly in Rainbow 6 Siege, an
| online FPS game. On the level I play, the game can be very fast
| paced. Often I score simply because I'm more patient, not
| because I click more accurately or faster.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This is what professional poker players do, and if the goal
| is winning it works. It also changes what was originally a
| pleasurable social activity into a grinding job, which I
| don't want for things that I currently find fun, like ping
| pong.
| fernandopj wrote:
| Exactly. This is the reason at one point I stopped being
| invited to casual poker games with friends of friends. I
| was amateur level compared to professionals, but just
| because I don't make blunders, any game session 4 hours
| long were enough for me to systematically get most if not
| all of everyone else's money and ruin their fun.
| sitkack wrote:
| You kinda broke the social contract of why that group was
| hanging out and playing. Not saying you were this guy,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxgDaCOS-tE
| vundercind wrote:
| This kind of play is boring in a friendly setting because
| you're folding so damn often. That bothers me more than
| how often someone's winning (and is why my friend group
| doesn't play anymore--the guy most-interested in
| organizing games plays "correctly", and it's _boring_ ,
| so nobody wants to do it)
| taneq wrote:
| Not sure if it's been linked in this thread yet (although I did
| see it on another post yesterday) but iirc this is one of the
| core messages of Playing To Win by David Sirlin
| (https://www.sirlin.net/ptw). To win, all you have to do is not
| lose.
| Omroth wrote:
| "Not strategy, not memorizing opening lines, not practicing your
| end-game technique, not studying the Great Games of History, not
| drilling with puzzles to get better at tactics,"
|
| "In my games, the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of
| the time."
|
| Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their
| blunder rate.
| ruined wrote:
| it's simple. if i were playing the game, i would make moves
| that lead to victory, and i wouldn't make moves that lead to
| defeat. that way, i would always win.
|
| making mistakes seems really stupid and i'm not sure why anyone
| would do that.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| I think the point is to, instead of being on the lookout for
| the winning strategy, put more of your limited attention on
| preventing basic mistakes. It's about shifting focus,
| presumably, there's a baseline of competence in the endeavor at
| hand.
| tech_ken wrote:
| These things all help, but ultimately reduction of blunders is
| the result of consciously checking whether you're blundering
| something, not being a genius calculator. Most blunders in
| chess (outside of the higher-levels) aren't the result of
| failing to see some 5-move tactical sequence, they're just
| hanging a rook because you were hyper-focused on your own
| initiative. Controlling your blunder rate is IMO a game of
| attending to your own mental state: ensuring that you're giving
| proper consideration to your opponents threats, being realistic
| about your advantages, and preventing your imagination from
| running away on you. Obviously study and puzzles can help you
| do these things more effectively (for example making you more
| likely to pick up material when your opponent blunders), but
| they are a necessity not a sufficiency. At the end of the day
| 'not blundering' is about staying humble, playing slowly, and
| not freaking out; everything else is points on the margin.
| bsder wrote:
| > Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their
| blunder rate.
|
| Checklist:
|
| 1) Is there a checkmate? Yeah, you might want to stop it if you
| don't want to lose.
|
| 2) Is there a check? Checks are forcing and can make you do
| things you don't want to do. You probably want to prevent them.
|
| 3) Is there a capture? A piece with no defenders that can be
| grabbed probably needs to have something done about it.
|
| 4) Is there an undefended piece? Undefended pieces become
| capturable. Defend it.
|
| 5) Do you have _any_ plan at all? Even a bad one is better than
| none at all.
|
| The problem is that there are lots of these on a board. When
| you first start doing this, it's a slow process, and it is not
| _fun_. But you will get _much_ better _very_ quickly.
| komposit wrote:
| IN many ways this is just another perspective on the need for
| taking calculated risks. I think this becomes even more
| interesting when you add the factor time into it. I usually play
| 3+2 type games where each player gets 3 minutes on the clock plus
| 2 for each additional move. In this kind of setup i've found that
| playing more risky aggressive moves on the one hand exposes you
| to make blunders, but it also gives you the initiative and causes
| the opposing player to spend more compute time checking possible
| variations.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| So the advice is "don't make so many small mistakes that it kills
| you"? and 20% of the time "don't make a fatal mistake". I just
| don't find this very helpful. Anyone who's worked at a startup
| already knows (1) it is a daily grind, (2) you don't die as often
| as you enter a zombie state.
| viggity wrote:
| "zombie state". I love that. I was the CTO of a healthcare
| startup for 6 years. Would have been a wonderful business for
| like 1-2 people to own but we raised venture funding. We made
| good money, had ok growth (attrition was high because well,
| that's what happens when your patient population is 70yo and
| have heart problems). I liked to phrase it as "a mediocre
| success is worse than a failure". You just get strung along,
| looking for a breakout, but are stuck with 10% growth.
| jprete wrote:
| I think the sports analogy is bad. Using table tennis as an
| example, a point can look blundered from the outside, but really
| the opponent hit a very difficult shot to return and the player
| did their best to do so. There's also the ongoing factor of one's
| position relative to the table and one's read of the opponent's
| likely next shot. These aren't factors that can be judged just
| with a simple measure of whether the player's return hit went
| wide.
| topaz0 wrote:
| I think this is a case where doing the automated analysis on a
| large dataset is misleading, because the automated analysis is
| based on an automated evaluation of how good a move is. Another
| way of saying "don't blunder" in this context is "choose a move
| that is not much worse than the best move". That is hardly more
| useful advice than "choose the best move". The advice "don't
| blunder" only becomes useful when you can also give advice about
| how to recognize blunders: "check whether your pieces are
| hanging", "check whether your opponent has mate in 1", "check for
| forks". Probably many of the blunders in that dataset are simple
| things like this, but others are long forcing lines or
| counterintuitive sacrifices that are difficult to recognize both
| for you and for your opponent. The computer doesn't distinguish,
| but it's much easier to improve by focusing on the former than
| the latter. (obviously to continue to improve you have to do
| both, but "not hanging pieces" is a lot less work).
| lakomen wrote:
| What a useless post. BRB while I control things I'm never able to
| control
| vundercind wrote:
| I'm bad enough at chess that every match features some blunders.
|
| It's why I can only play humans. Any not-extremely-subtle-in-its-
| badness blunder is spotted too consistently by even "easy" chess
| engines. IIRC I used to go about 50/50 versus the weakest
| computer on Chessmaster and the entire experience was _stressful_
| rather than fun, LOL.
| keeptrying wrote:
| On the face of it this seems to imply, moving slowly and
| deliberately.
|
| However this is not always true.
|
| Example: Detroit lions Vs SF in 2023 playoffs. Avoiding
| blundering means being adaptable to the situation at hand - not
| using instinct derived from previous battles.
| upwardbound wrote:
| > I computed a simple "error score" that includes mistakes while
| giving blunders more weight: [number of mistakes] x 2*[number of
| blunders]
|
| This doesn't give blunders more weight..
|
| Multiplication is commutative and associative, so the author's
| formula is also the same as this one: 2*[number of mistakes] x
| [number of blunders]
|
| To give more weight to blunders, you could use an exponent, which
| is a common trick in baseball statistics (SABRmetrics), like
| this: [number of mistakes] x [number of blunders ^ 1.1]
|
| See e.g. some of the formula concepts invented by Bill James
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James#Innovations
| rKarpinski wrote:
| Think the star represents exponent, otherwise they are using
| two different symbols for multiplication.
| jprete wrote:
| It's possible, but that formula is (after a log2
| transformation) equivalent in comparison power to
| log2(mistakes) + blunders. This is almost reducing the
| mistake term to a tiebreaker, because mistakes and blunders
| are on the same scale (a proportion of the number of actions
| taken in a game).
| rKarpinski wrote:
| > This is almost reducing the mistake term to a tiebreaker
|
| Isn't that exactly what it's supposed to be?
|
| >> However, in 40% of the games both players had an equal
| number of blunders. So I also included "mistakes"--the
| next-worst kind of error.
| smartbear wrote:
| (Author of article)
|
| Sorry, that was supposed to be +, not * !
|
| You're right. Just a typo! Now fixed.
| talldatethrow wrote:
| Totally unrelated side note, but I was in car sales for almost a
| decade and was better than top 1% nationwide basically since the
| first year. Averaging 34 cars a month when national average is
| 11.
|
| People always asked for advice and in general my advice was
| "don't shoot yourself in the foot".
|
| Actual particular style or methods aren't that important because
| whatever style you have will work on some and not on others, so
| just keep yourself and your pipeline busy with people that are ok
| with that style.
|
| But don't mess up in a way to loose people. You don't need the
| world's best opener. You need an opener that doesn't turn people
| off.
|
| You don't need to be the best more charismatic person, just don't
| turn people off.
|
| You don't need to be the world strongest closer, just don't turn
| people off making them get up and leave.
|
| Stop making mistakes, and the rest is usually fine.
| petsfed wrote:
| Turns out "get the hell out of the way" is very good baseline
| advice for a lot of situations.
|
| Want to make a sale? Get a customer in the room with a good
| product, then get the hell out of the way.
|
| Want your team of engineers to build incredible things? Hire
| good people, then get the hell out of the way.
|
| Its not perfect, it hinges a lot on starting from a good place,
| but if you're in a situation where everybody in the room wants
| essentially the same thing (for the project to succeed, for the
| customer to drive away with a new car, etc), the best thing you
| can do is simply not interfere with the process that arises
| organically.
| spxneo wrote:
| i like this even better! so much workflows often get tainted
| by top down ego.
|
| delegate and trust.
| spxneo wrote:
| very sound advice not just in sales but dating too
|
| dont be a turn off dont signal turn off behaviour
| eggbrain wrote:
| I struggle with how I'm supposed to grok this advice, as it feels
| like a tautology.
|
| E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't
| just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing
| technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know
| _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder,
| which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the
| blunder ahead of time in some fashion?
|
| The main caveats I can think of are
| ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring
| about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which
| revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not
| make a blunder.
| a_t48 wrote:
| Many many chess blunders are as simple as "I moved a piece
| where it can be immediately taken".
| Dove wrote:
| Some of the best advice I've ever heard comes from the
| following observation: Blundering is often a
| result of trying to overplay a small advantage.
|
| If you are playing thoughtfully, with an eye on the whole game,
| you are smart enough not to blunder. It's when you get excited
| about pursuing an opportunity that you overlook mistakes.
|
| Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose sight
| of the big picture. Or alternatively, when you see an
| opportunity, look for the danger.
|
| The insight has served me extremely well in competitive and
| security contexts, and I think it accounts for a lot of
| blunders in product design as well.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > Play your advantages and play them hard. But don't lose
| sight of the big picture.
|
| Almost nothing is more dangerous to my winning chances than
| exiting the opening with a small material or positional
| advantage. Opponent is now incentivized to attack
| ferociously, and I'm left struggling to figure out the safest
| way to convert without playing too passively but also not
| over-pushing.
| setgree wrote:
| I agree. I like the way Arnold Kling expresses a similar idea
| [1]: "One of my beliefs about competition is that the business
| world is very forgiving of mistakes... On October 11, 1999, our
| business, along with the Scottsdale relocation business, was
| sold to homestore.com for $85 million. My share was quite
| dilute by this point...But a couple of percent of $85 million
| is still real money, particularly considering the sequence of
| mistakes, miscalculations, misjudgments, and erroneous
| forecasts that led to it."
|
| Kling and coworkers had an important insight about what the
| internet was going to do to home-buying. This made up, in part,
| for such obvious blunders as failing to buy MapQuest.
|
| [1] https://arnoldkling.com/~arnoldsk/aimst2/aimst218.html
| greedo wrote:
| Most blunders (at least 1500 ELO and below) are often board
| observation blunders, where your board vision lets you down.
| Either you're too tunnel visioned on your own attack or you
| just expose yourself to simple tactics. When I first started
| playing online, I would routinely blunder my queen roughly 10%
| of the time. Luckily I've improved and only do it 9% of the
| time...
| sourcepluck wrote:
| There are some major misunderstandings about chess amongst the
| general public. "Wanting to not blunder" and "not blundering" are
| two very different things.
|
| I remember an in-person rapid tournament, 12m with a 3s
| increment, I was rated ~1600, playing a lot at the time, reading
| books, etc. In the first round got matched against the highest
| rated player there (which is normal, someone has to play them in
| the first round).
|
| He was an IM, skittish small fellow, something like ~2200 or
| ~2300, I can't remember. Table 1 was up on a little podium. So we
| go through the opening, middle-game, and this guy is just sitting
| back. Solid, non-threatening, relaxed, barely used any time on
| his clock. I'm sweating, taking ages, nervous, seeing dragons
| around each corner.
|
| I try reason with myself: look, this guy is in a worse spot than
| you, he has more to lose, etc. He's waiting for you to make a
| mistake. He is avoiding exchanges, and making little probing
| threats, at best. Just breathe, stay in the game, let him attempt
| an attack! Just keep things solid, and don't blunder!
|
| We go back and forth like this for at best 4 or 5 moves into the
| middlegame let's say.
|
| His move: he smiles apologetically and takes the rook I just put
| on an unprotected square his bishop was _very_ clearly hitting. I
| resign with an embarrassed look and whisper an apology for my
| stupidity.
|
| My advice to anyone who is feeling too big for their jodhpurs: go
| study chess as hard as you can, for as long as you like, and then
| go play a few tournaments. 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with
| you and then their Mom will make them a sandwich while they move
| on with their life.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with you
|
| Was chatting with a guy who used to play pick up games at the
| Marshall and I remember him talking about how humbling it was
| to get your head kicked in by like a 7 year old. I think this
| is one of the coolest things about chess: in most other
| competitions age is a huge predictor of the outcome (I'd crush
| a 7 year old in basketball), but in chess it can be almost
| harder to face a young opponent because their learning rate is
| so ferocious and they're young enough that pride often isn't a
| distractor. One of my ongoing struggles in getting my Elo
| higher is to try and keep the childlike playfulness front-and-
| center. As you say in your anecdote: it's all about playing
| simple moves and not getting tilted. Let the super-GMs
| calculate 15-move lines.
| zoogeny wrote:
| This is mostly tangential to the article contents, but I've been
| watching interviews and talks by Benoit Mandelbrot [1] recently.
| I was a little surprised to find his work outside of fractals to
| be extremely interesting. He characterizes his own work as being
| on the general concept of "roughness".
|
| The reason I bring it up in context of this article for
| blundering, is that he studies the chaotic movement of stock
| markets from the abstract perspective of "roughness". That is, he
| is interested in categorizing patterns that are in some kind of
| grey zone between smooth and completely chaotic.
|
| One of the features I recall him mentioning in one of his
| introductions was related to "black swan" type events in markets.
| He suggests that only a few stock movements over time account for
| the majority of loss/gain. This is a feature he was interested in
| exploring and recreating using mathematical models and it lead
| him to investigate sampling from stochastic distributions that
| are not Gaussian.
|
| This view is forcing me to evaluate some of this startup/business
| advice in a new light. This article seems to assume that both in
| chess and business that "blunders" are distributed in a normal
| way (probably not the correct mathematical term but I hope it
| communicates what I mean). But in reality, some blunders are tiny
| and some are massive.
|
| Consider, you can avoid 99 out of 100 blunders but if the 1
| blunder you make is that black swan blunder then you are dead.
| Conversely, you can make 99 out of 100 blunders but if you avoid
| that 1 black swan blunder then you can survive and even thrive.
| Of course, avoiding all blunders just happens to ensure that you
| also miss the catastrophic ones.
|
| I haven't fully digested this idea but I think it is the basis
| for some profound advancement in our understanding. The problem
| is we can't really tell at any given moment which events are the
| ones that will end up being the most impactful, that seems to
| only come in hindsight. But even just realizing that there is an
| unequal distribution to the contribution of events over time
| feels pretty important to me.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benoit_Mandelbrot
| bluedino wrote:
| People always tell me they wish they were good at cooking.
|
| The biggest thing is don't mess up.
|
| Don't burn anything, don't undercook it, don't overseason, don't
| underseason. Even if it's just "okay", if you can avoid ruining
| food, consistently, people will start to refer to you as a 'good
| cook'.
|
| Or in another way, just don't be a bad cook and you'll be a good
| one.
| jitl wrote:
| A lot of this is recipe selection too! If you are a beginner,
| and have people coming over, don't pick a new recipe or a
| complicated old recipe. Do something easy, especially if you're
| doubling to feed more mouths.
|
| corollary: Thanksgiving is a day for cooking standards, not
| innovating (unless you've practiced)
| phone8675309 wrote:
| I've never seen anyone more stressed in the kitchen than my
| partner trying to debone and roll a turkey for Thanksgiving
| as opposed to doing it the standard way in the oven.
|
| They went to culinary school, but this was a production for
| family and was uniquely stressful for them. It turned out
| fantastic but they were wrecked for the rest of that long
| weekend.
| mostly_harmless wrote:
| I feel this way for photography, about filtering. If you take
| 1000 photos, only show people your 20-50 best. Now you are a
| good photographer.
| ljm wrote:
| Prep first and follow the recipe. It's not as hard as it seems
| if you get all your ingredients ready and then start cooking.
| It is _literally_ a list of instructions. It tells you what to
| do. No imagination needed.
|
| It becomes a lot easier to fuck it up if you try to prep on the
| fly because you'll never get the timing right, which means you
| won't be following the instructions any more.
| petsfed wrote:
| This neatly encapsulates why (and how) Pabst Blue Ribbon beer
| plausibly (but never confirmed) won that blue ribbon in 1893:
| at a time when beer was especially hard to get just right,
| tasting the same every time is a huge technical win.
| RachelF wrote:
| It is the same with military history. Many wars are lost
| because of blunders, often your military can do more damage to
| itself than an enemy can do.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast"
|
| This applies to software engineering and I've had a hard time
| explaining it to people throughout my career.
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