competition

Losing Games

This is part of my 5 Minute Concepts series, which is designed to help you understand fundamental concepts about subjects like learning, memory and competition in the shortest time possible. Each episode is available in video format on my YouTube channel and audio via my podcast. If you prefer to read, the transcript is below.

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Much of what I create revolves around the idea of competing intelligently. My overall hypothesis about competition is that most people do it haphazardly, and expect their own intuitions — mixed with a recognition of incentives — to carry them to victory.

Thinking this way is a serious error. It leads to making the same mistakes over and over again, and creates situations where meaningful learning takes much longer than it should.

What’s more important, in my opinion, is that we recognize just how competitive the world is. Competition exists at all levels of life, all the way down to single-celled organisms. Competition is a key component of evolutionary biology, and there isn’t any form of life on earth that can escape this dynamic.

There’s competition for money, competition for status, competition for relationships. There’s competition everywhere.

Life is competition and competition is life.

With all that being said, there’s an idea that’s just as important to keep in mind: sometimes, you’re playing a game you can’t win — no matter how intelligent you are or how hard you work. When you find yourself in this kind of game, what can be called a losing game, you need to exit that game as fast as you can.

Recognizing losing games like this is a skill in and of itself, one that many people find hard to develop. It’s particularly common in American culture, where we’re constantly told that hard work is the answer to all of life’s problems.

An extreme example I like to use is professional basketball. The first requirement for playing basketball at the pro level is to be very tall, which is something you can’t train for. You’re either born with tall genetics or you aren’t.

This can be a hard pill to swallow for people who don’t hit those height requirements but love the game enough to dedicate their lives to it. Someone who is only average height can spend every waking hour refining their game, doing everything they can to get better, and still come up short.

The problem in this situation isn’t that the player isn’t committed or intelligent enough. It’s just not a game they can win — and there’s nothing they can do about that.

Instead, this same player could find another way to be involved with the game. Maybe they could find work as a talent scout, or a commentator, or a sports writer, and still play for fun in recreational leagues.

Maybe they’re an exceptional programmer or mathematician, and that could allow them to build some kind of technological product that is intertwined with basketball.

Those are all winnable games for this fictional person: they offer odds with large payoffs and none of them have requirements that are impossible to train for.

What tends to drive people like this crazy is the search for glory. They want to do what’s most admired in society, like playing a sport professionally.

The irony is that wasting time on paths like this more often than not generates an excessive amount of unnecessary misery. Most people don’t really know what they want, they just think they know, so they waste their time pursuing goals that other people or society set for them.

That same player who wants to be a player more than anything might find more fulfillment in an auxiliary role than they can estimate.

Instead of wasting years pursuing a professional playing career that ends badly, they should find something else that might even end up being more fulfilling (or even lucrative).

Sometimes you can create the game yourself, and sometimes you have to go play someone else’s game. Either way, you should be doing this kind of analysis on a regular basis. Every now and then, stop and ask yourself: Is this a game I can win?

I’ve failed at this more times than I can count, and it’s cost me dearly on a few occasions. Hopefully you can heed my words and not make the same mistakes I have. Don’t play games you can’t win — find a place where you can play with favorable odds, and then throw yourself into that.

Failure & Learning

Ace Eddleman

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Transcript:

Failure is a subject that I have a love-hate relationship with. On the one hand, failure is an important feedback mechanism that can drive learning. On the other hand, it’s been fetishized by the self-help crowd and turned into some glorious path to success.

Yes, it is true failures are inevitable and cannot be divorced from the expertise-gathering process. Everyone, even the best in the world in any given field, has experienced failure at one point or another along the way.

Sometimes a particular type of failure — usually some kind of dramatic departure from what you wanted to happen — can act as a beacon for a beneficial change that leads to a big win. That is a very real side of failure, and I don’t want to discount the value of failure in certain situations.

And yet there are all kinds of memes that lead people to view failure in the wrong light, or get used as a means of not doing the hard (but necessary) work of examining why they failed.

The most common meme around failure is the “Man in the arena” quote by Teddy Roosevelt. Now, I’m not knocking the quote — there’s a lot to be said for giving something a shot when others aren’t willing to — but I am knocking how it’s used as a means of hand-waving away failures.

Every time I see or hear someone using that quote, I want to ask that person, “Is failure always meaningful?” The hard truth is that it usually isn’t, and sometimes critical failures completely derail us. Sometimes that derailing is permanent.

It’s important to confront this uncomfortable truth head-on. There are, in fact, events in life that have serious consequences. There are situations where it’s not possible to recover from a failure, as much as we might want to play the role of the eternal optimist.

Why do we fail? More often than not, it’s because we underestimate the problem we’re trying to solve, and overestimate our ability to solve it. Or we don’t even understand the problem in the first place, and as a result we apply an inappropriate solution.

It’s common to lean too much on our own psychology as well. We think that belief or motivation alone are enough, when more often than not they’re only small, insignificant pieces of the puzzle.

We tend to have high opinions of ourselves, so it’s not so shocking that we step on landmines which could have been spotted if we had our egos a little more in check. When it becomes clear that failure is inevitable, we’re shocked at our own hubris — but alas, it’s too late.

After the fact, we’re prone to pointing fingers in the wrong directions. Not to say that there aren’t ever external factors to blame (I’m personally not a fan of the “absolutely everything is the fault of the individual” school of thought), but there are usually signs that mistakes were made ahead of time.

So, now that we have that dark side out of the way, when does failure help us instead of hurt us? What are the heuristics we can all use to figure out if we’re failing in the right direction, or just failing?

While there isn’t a simple algorithm for all situations, there are some guidelines you can use to make an educated guess.

First of all, ask yourself if said failure was unexpected. If it was, what kind of probability did you assign to it? If it wasn’t, what could you have done to stop it? Asking these questions will force you to confront your own estimations of yourself and what you were trying to accomplish.

Second, was something meaningful learned from the failure? It’s critical to be honest here — don’t just make up some sorry, generic phrase to describe the failure like “I learned that I have a long way to go.” That may be true, but you need to be specific — what actions led to this outcome? What could you have done differently?

Lastly, what’s your experience level in this domain? If you’re brand new, it’s normal to fail a ton, and it’s equally normal to learn quite a bit from each failure.

As your experience increases, you’ll hit diminishing returns on each failure because you should be collecting enough data to fix the biggest mistakes over time.

If you possess a deep level of expertise and you’re making big mistakes, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. The world you’re in may have changed in some fundamental way, and you might have to rethink how you approach solving that set of problems.

You’ll never escape failure entirely — even the best still screw up sometimes — but you should see a decreasing frequency in the biggest failures if you’re learning the right way.

In general, it’s worth pondering the overall value of failure. In many cases it’s not helpful, despite what the gurus would lead you to believe. But it’s also a crucial part of any successful learning plan, especially for beginners.

You could say that failure is both underrated and overrated, it just depends on the nature of the failure itself and who it’s affecting. Think about that next time you hit a snag in your learning.

Attrition Warfare

Ace Eddleman

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Attrition warfare is a set of strategies that revolve around beating an opponent by wearing them down in some way. While most people talk about it in terms of its military applications — namely the common practice of bombing a country into submission over extended periods of time — it’s worth thinking about in a broader context.

Let’s not focus on the “warfare” part. It isn’t just about trying to drop literal tons of explosive ordinance, it’s also about how competitors behave within arenas where so-called “honor” can play a perceptual role.

To understand what I mean, consider what attrition warfare looks like in another violent, competitive domain: mixed martial arts. It’s not uncommon for fighters to stand and exchange punches for long stretches of time, seeing who will break or lose consciousness first.

Rather than try to play the mental game of faints and deception to create critical openings, the two fighters decide to turn the fight into a test of toughness.

Doing this turns a fight that might have been one-sided — with one opponent exploiting the weaknesses of the other to score a quick victory — into the fighting equivalent of a coin-toss. Advantages are ignored and the victor is determined more by luck than skill.

To use chess as another example, it’d be like playing a strategy that revolves around constantly exchanging pieces with your opponent until you’re only down to two kings. This stands in stark contrast to strategies that focus on quick, brutal victories.

This is a popular route to take in many competitive games because crowds love to see a spectacle, and in most cultures (especially American culture), deception of any kind is viewed as the mark of the coward. Attrition warfare is considered more “honorable” than any sort of trickery, and this pervasive thought pattern influences the psychology of competitors.

The hard truth is that attrition warfare represents an impoverished, misguided set of ideas. Whenever you’re dealing with intense competition — especially if it’s life-or-death, like real war — you should always be looking for the fastest, most efficient path to victory. More often than not, this requires some type of deception.

Honor can’t be your first priority in those situations. Think of all the soldiers who died in World War 1 because their commanders ordered them to storm over a trench wall into machine gun fire. For the aristocrats who ran the armies of that conflict, such decisions were considered the “gentlemanly” way to fight a war.

It took some serious courage for those soldiers to follow those orders, but that’s no consolation for the loved ones they left behind. They would have been better off if their commanders had been willing to entertain more indirect strategies, ones where the bloodshed could have been reduced and strategic objectives realistically achieved.

To use the example of the fighters from before, even the winner ends up suffering a great deal in the end. They might end the night with a shiny belt around their waist and a bonus for putting on an exciting fight, but they might also have life-altering injuries as well.

The loser fares even worse, as they have to tolerate all the consequences of their attrition-focused approach without any of the upsides that come with victory.

From all of this we can generate a fundamental principle: the use of attrition warfare should always be considered a failure — even if you win. Falling back on attrition strategies means you made a mistake — in many cases, a big, avoidable mistake.

A fighter who gets forced into a slugfest or a military that sees a full-frontal charge as the only acceptable option both represent entities who make a series of wrong turns. It might come from a lack of planning, or it might stem from an emotional weakness that drags them into honor contests. Whatever it is that created the situation, it needs to be fixed.

Never forget that winning is what matters in a competitive context. If you’re getting dragged into a battle of attrition, it’s time to press pause, step back, and figure out how you can find a better path forward.

The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma, Simplified

Ace Eddleman

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Transcript:

I’ve written about the exploration-exploitation dilemma before, but only in a long-form essay format. Since I think this is such a critical concept, and I realize that not everyone has the time to read a big essay, I’ve created this simplified explanation.

Just a warning: like any other 5 Minute Concepts piece, there’s always more to the story. I’m just trying to give you the most important parts in 5 minutes or less.

Anyway…

Let’s start with a stripped-down definition: the exploration-exploitation dilemma is the choice we all have to make between learning more or taking action with the knowledge we already possess.

Learning more is exploration, acting with current knowledge is exploitation.

With either action you’re trying to find some way to maximize what’s often referred to as “reward,” or some end-state that you find desirable.

The reason this is a dilemma is simple: you can’t explore or exploit exclusively and win in the long run.

If all you do is explore, you’ll never take action in the world — which means you get a predictable payoff of exactly zero. There isn’t much to be gained from passively gathering information until you die.

On the other hand, taking action without learning anything is also a long-term losing strategy. You do get some kind of reward by exploiting a known path, but that means you’re giving up any chance at a higher payoff that might be staring you in the face without you knowing about it.

The real kicker here is that exploring is what drives the value of exploitation, and vice versa. You need to explore in order to find good paths for exploitation, and you need to exploit in order to get a reward for your exploration. Both actions are dependent on each other.

What you’re balancing in either case is opportunity cost. You have a limited amount of resources, such as time and money, to work with over the course of your life. If you explore, you’re by default not exploiting, and vice versa.

Consider this example: Let’s say you’re scrolling through Netflix, looking for something to watch for the new couple of hours.

You notice that a movie you’ve seen a dozen times is one of the choices and consider watching it. Right next to that is a movie you’ve never seen before.

Choosing the movie you’ve seen provides a specific emotional payoff for you. You know all the best parts and you’re well aware of how the entire experience will make you feel.

Choosing the movie you’ve never seen means taking a certain amount of risk. There’s an unknown payoff for watching this new movie, and it might end up being a waste of two hours. Those two hours will be gone, never to return.

But you might also discover a new favorite movie, or genre, or director, that you never knew about.

It’s easy to get sucked into either extreme. I’ve known people who spent their whole lives reading, accumulating a veritable library worth of knowledge in their head, but never tried to do anything with it.

And, of course, I’m sure we both know people who have never read a book or stopped to think for even a moment about whether their beliefs and actions should be altered in some way.

While this is an unsolved problem (and trust me, many people have tried to figure it out), there are some good rules of thumb to run with. First of all, don’t favor a binary approach. Only exploring or only exploiting doesn’t work in the long run.

Secondly, it pays to spend a lot of time exploring early on and then shifting more and more to exploitation over time. But — this is critical — you never stop exploring completely. For a person in the real world, exploring should always be part of your strategy.

There’s always some accommodation made for learning new things. This is known as the epsilon-decreasing algorithm, and, if you just want a simple heuristic for managing this dilemma, it’s a pretty good place to start.

Third, there are always inflection points where it makes sense to shift from one to the other. Sometimes it’s a moment where you realize you’ve finally reached a level of knowledge that grants you a new level of competence and the time to utilize it has come. Passing a professional exam is a simple example of this.

Other times you might suffer a bitter defeat and receive an unfiltered signal that it’s time to explore. If a big project you’ve been working on fails, for example, you might need to go back to the drawing board and evaluate how to improve for your next attempt.

I could talk about this for hours, but in general I want you to understand this: figuring out how to spread your time between exploration and exploitation is perhaps the most important problem you’ll ever face.

Don’t push this into the background — be conscious and deliberate about it. Doing that might just change your life in ways you never saw coming.

Donkeyspace

Ace Eddleman

Want to know when new content shows up? Sign up for my newsletter here.

Transcript:

Let’s talk about donkeyspace.

Donkeyspace is the space of suboptimal play within a game. It’s a way to talk about how to play a game incorrectly — which ironically turns out to be pretty important for anyone who wants to compete and win.

What does “suboptimal” mean? A simple way to think about it is “playing in a way that will not result in winning over long periods of time and many repetitions,” or, if you’re more advanced, “playing in a negative-expected value fashion.”

We’re going to explore the implications of donkeyspace, but for now I want you to internalize this idea: If you want to beat other players who are playing suboptimally, you need to play in a suboptimal way yourself.

It’s counter-intuitive to think about, but bear with me here.

To quote David Sirlin, “a good player should intentionally enter donkeyspace (in other words: play in an exploitable way) in order to exploit opponents who are also playing in donkeyspace.”

A good example of what this means can be found in rock-paper-scissors. This is a game with an “optimal” algorithm that involves an equal distribution of each type of play (which would be 33% for each one). But let’s say you’re playing against someone who only plays scissors.

You come into the game reviewing your game plan, thinking of all the different ways you’ll beat your opponent if he throws rock, paper, or scissors, and this guy is going to play only one of them.

He isn’t trying to mix it up one bit, no 33% strategies for him. Just 100% scissors.

This sounds ridiculous, but there are people who operate this way to one degree or another. The term donkeyspace itself comes from poker, where weak, unskilled players are often called “donkeys” or “donks” (although the more common pejorative now is “fish”).

An opponent who only plays scissors is pretty much the definition of a donkey. He is firmly living in an uncharted region of deep donkeyspace.

Anyway, now you need to ask: how do you beat someone like this? If you continue to play in the so-called “optimal” way, you’ll only beat him about a third of the time (whenever you play rock).

Every other time, he’ll either win or force a draw. So to beat him, you have no choice to but play in a “suboptimal” way — to only play rock.

You have to enter donkeyspace to beat a donkey.

This means you’re playing in a way that, against skilled opponents who know what they’re doing, you’d get crushed. But against a donkey, you have to adapt and “become the donkey” so to speak.

I see this all time in competitive environments, where high-skill players get pissed off because a low-skill player pulls a donkey move and wins. They kick and scream about how a player “isn’t supposed to do that.”

In reality, this is a failure on the part of the more skilled player, because they need to recognize when they’re dealing with a donkey and then make a transition into donkeyspace.

Now, some caveats. First of all, it’s important to remember that everyone is in donkeyspace to one degree or another. Except in solved games, it’s pretty much impossible to play in a perfectly optimal way.

And since nobody can play these games optimally, everyone exists, by default, in some kind of donkeyspace. Competitive games are therefore often just players maneuvering between various levels of donkeyspace.

Secondly, every time you enter a new level of donkeyspace you become more exploitable. This by itself creates all kinds of strategic possibilities.

It’s possible, for example, to trick people into thinking you’re a donkey, which then makes them transition into a lower level of donkeyspace, which gives you an opportunity to exploit them. The hunter becomes the hunted.

High-level players are very good at this kind of multifaceted deception. They faint and make you believe they’re making a mistake, when in reality they’re drawing you into a trap.

What’s the lesson here? It can be summed up as “sometimes it’s correct to play incorrectly.” Whenever you’re competing against other people, think about where everyone is in donkeyspace — including you — and consider how you need to adjust your play.

Do this regularly enough, and you’ll give yourself a substantial edge.