Groups never admit failure

by todsacerdoti • 5 years ago

485 298 5 years ago

jseliger• 5 years ago

I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving out money for a cause, and I found it very disillusioning because what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they would declare victory. Every project was victorious. Every project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping. There were a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners—but nothing ever got done.

This is what most nonprofits, and a surprisingly large number of businesses, are like: https://seliger.com/2012/03/25/why-fund-organizations-throug.... Some nonprofits mistakenly believe that grant evaluations are about evaluating the efficacy of the program, rather than declaring victory: https://seliger.com/2013/06/02/with-charity-for-all-ken-ster...

lumost2• 5 years ago

An important corollary is that if you mistakenly attempt to rationally evaluate a program when everyone expects backslapping... then it's going to come across as a declaration of abject failure.

When stakeholders expect victory to look rosy, and instead it looks balanced then they'll believe something went wrong.

jjoonathan• 5 years ago

I accidentally killed a very promising project this way. I gave a pitch demonstrating how it could stand up brilliantly to multiple avenues of ruthless investigation and criticism. People didn't listen to the words, they listened to the emotion of the ruthless investigation, and they discarded the idea in favor of one which would have tipped over if someone had brought a similar magnifying glass to within a mile.

Once I realized that good pitches were about emotions, I started getting much better results.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 5 years ago

I was on the board of a foundation [ ... ]

I strongly suspect this was a US-based foundation. That behavior is not exclusive to the USA, but much, much more predominant here. It's almost a stereotype of US (individual and corporate) behavior.

robocat• 5 years ago

Quote from reviewed book in link: “a bedrock and simplistic assumption that has long shackled the charitable world: that money spent on direct services is the only worthy use of charitable funds, while money invested in organizational effectiveness is to be kept as close to zero as possible. It is an equation widely accepted by the donating public, by the press, by charity watchdogs, by government regulators, and by most charities themselves. To keep overhead costs down, charities forgo necessary investments with devastating and sometimes deadly results.”

There are a lot of parasitic organisations that provide shitty expensive advice/consultancy services to crappy charities. A sort of web of symbiotic parasites, helping charities to provide no value. It is no surprise that crappy charities can spend a ton of money on “organisational effectiveness” that only return negative value overall.

77pt772• 5 years ago

There were a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners—but nothing ever got done.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

"The Red Queen"

Animats2• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Now that is a useful insight.

It's a big problem for voluntary associations. Companies can sometimes change their culture, but it usually requires replacing the CEO.

This has come up a few times in military history. "L'audace, toujours l'audace" was a WWI French slogan. It took a huge number of casualties before high command got it that charging into machine guns does not work. Courage does not help. In WWII, a big change was discovering that battleships are not useful once the enemy has torpedo bombers. The resistance of the battleship admirals was overcome by Congress, not the Navy. Congress ordered that the captains of aircraft carriers must be qualified to fly aircraft. Sidelining the "Gun Club" took major political effort.

Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia", which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10.

asmos7• 5 years ago

people have a hard time realizing when the technology they've spent their lives learning and perfecting is no longer applicable

salawat• 5 years ago

People have an equally hard time realizing that there is very little genuinely 'new' under the Sun, and today's 'wizbang' was yesterday's 'vozalm' with a superficial change to it.

kiba• 5 years ago

Only in the last few centuries. Progress is not forever.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Actually I think any organism or group that can balance certainty and observation is peak.

snarf212• 5 years ago

It is the same old thing, they became successful doing X and that works great until X isn't the optimal thing. However, after 50 years doing the same thing, they are a one trick pony.

Also, the A-10 is one heck of a plane and always my favorite. Largest caliber nose cannon and the ability to limp back to base on one engine and one rudder is so freaking cool. There is a National Guard base nearby and it is so cool watching them do flybys on the small mountains.

topspin• 5 years ago

There is a National Guard base nearby and it is so cool watching them do flybys on the small mountains.

I'm near a different A-10 base. I've noted that they've stepped up training flights during the last two weeks. I'm wondering if it's related to the Russian build up on the Ukrainian frontier. Have you noticed more flights?

bsder• 5 years ago

It took a huge number of casualties before high command got it that charging into machine guns does not work.

Well, there was a nice posting here (hopefully someone will find it) about WWI and that 1) stasis was effectively inevitable and 2) you do have to charge the enemy occasionally or you can't maintain your stasis (it prevents them from moving their artillery forward).

Edit: Thank you, malcomwhite. https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-...

malcolmwhite• 5 years ago

hopefully someone will find it

https://acoup.blog/2021/09/17/collections-no-mans-land-part-...

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

It goes further than that. Charging into machine guns does work! It works fine. Offense won a little over 50% of the time, making it better than defense.

The problem, as identified in the post, is that although your charge usually succeeds, you end up taking ground that your pre-charge offensive barrage has made impossible to hold. And then you lose that ground.

hcarvalhoalves• 5 years ago

After a large organization is structured, it's objective will shift to the survival of the organization itself when the original (legitimate) objective is made irrelevant by internal or external factors ("winning", or a change in the context that required the objective in the first place).

I would expect an adage about this to already exist – if it doesn't, I'm claiming it. :)

bartread2• 5 years ago

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

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

cabalamat2• 5 years ago

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

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

Nasrudith• 5 years ago

The March of Dimes is an interesting counter-example. They went from a Polio cause to a premature infant one post-Salk.

ComodoHacker• 5 years ago

Can we apply this to Google-sized megacorps, when the original goal 'make money' has been overachieved?

kbelder• 5 years ago

Pournelle's "Iron law of bureaucracy" comes close...

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

derbOac• 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

madaxe_again3• 5 years ago

Indeed - my personal experience of this was at my business - I would admit my and our mistakes to the extent that the perception became that I was the source of all of our failures.

My partner was and is a person who is never wrong, never fails, never makes a mistake - it’s always someone else who stymied his ambitions, or circumstance, or just bad luck. Never an error.

I left, after a decade. It was partly of my own volition, but the moment I voiced the possibility he, and our investor, couldn’t show me the door quickly enough.

Now, here’s the rub.

I’ve been gone for nearly six years. In that time their revenue has fallen by 80%, their core product has been axed, and I am still the scapegoat.

Even when they ultimately fail completely, which they will, and soon, as none of the issues I identified have been addressed, I am certain that they will go down crying “damn you, madaxe_again”.

Reality, commercial or not, is purely a matter of perception.

Symmetry• 5 years ago

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

jimkleiber• 5 years ago

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

I struggle to hear someone use "never" and other absolutist language—as the author does—and imagine they are likely to admit a mistake as well. I think it can depend on how certain a group is, or as you mention, how the certain ones drive the less certain ones out of the group. I can imagine if there are people in a group who say "always" "never" "the best" "the worst" a lot, then yes, the more doubtful ones may leave and the group may become even more convicted in their rightness.

However, I don't think every group follows that path, possibly not having such people clinging to certainty or even if they do, the ones with more humility working together to downgrade the hubris.

Secondly, if you can't tell, I can feel quite frustrated when people speak with such certainty, and I'm grateful and impressed that you seemed able to look past that in the author's writing.

passion__desire• 5 years ago

Just like it takes time for probabilites to flow from one atomic orbital to another, I would assume this could form basis for the analogy for why it takes time for groups to change their mind.

Atomic Orbitals, Visualized Dynamically - https://youtu.be/BPkcDWLBsrI?t=412

bell-cot• 5 years ago

Similar to the "Gun Club" (and also in the U.S. in the WWII era) was the Bomber Mafia - convinced that lots of long-range heavy bombers could win any war:

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

They were profoundly resistant to reality (such as sustained "unsustainable" loss rates in un-escorted daytime bomber attacks on Germany), or even ideological compromises (such as long-range fighter escorts for those bombers)...up to the point where the en-mass sacking of mafia members, or massive "de-emphasis" of their branch of the armed forces were clear and present dangers.

Marazan• 5 years ago

The astonishing thing was that the UK had just sustained a massive bombing campaign by Germany whixh had veeu obviously and singularly failed to break the civilain spirit and make the UK sue for peace.

So, obviously, the UK airforce proposed that a massive bombing campaign would clearly break the German civilian spirit and force Germany to sue for peace.

kashyapc2• 5 years ago

Probably that can be a useful insight in some specific circumstances as you describe, but it falls flat as a generalization. Allow me a snark: maybe a group of venture capitalists (many of whom call themselves "angels") might not admit a mistake. But many groups (not as grandiose as the military, though) jolly well admit and own up non-trivial mistakes.

I participate in several open source projects over 13 years now. And as jancsika mentions in this thread, various times I've seen mature groups of contributors and maintainers admit, and articulate, really difficult mistakes in public. Granted, these are small groups ranging from six to twenty-ish. Still, it takes courage and wisdom to do it gracefully.

vanadium• 5 years ago

I think what separates the two camps is a positive incentive to admit failure, which is where the rarity comes in, as highlighted by other posters. If the group's incentive is integrity and trust, or loyalty and retention, it makes sense as there's a capital (political, monetary, etc.) incentive in doing so.

That's where I think the insight cleanly falls apart and yet holds up pretty well for the vast majority of situations. Rarely are groups actually positively incentivized to admit failure, and therefore they do not, as a cohesive unit, actually admit failure as there's a greater incentive not to, barring force.

WalterBright• 5 years ago

I have yet to make a mistake, but when I do I plan on publicly admitting it.

superjan• 5 years ago

Admitting mistakes is one thing. Admitting that what the organization has set out to do is unachievable is another.

rstuart4133• 5 years ago

I've seen mature groups of contributors and maintainers admit, and articulate, really difficult mistakes in public.

And do it right here on HN. Just the other day a member of the Python core team said the Python2 to Python3 transition was be a never to be repeated mistake.

Granted, these are small groups ranging from six to twenty-ish.

And big groups do it too, apparently. In community groups I'm in saying things like "we tried this but it didn't work" is a regular occurrence. They make for entertaining, self depreciating war stories, letting newbies know things aren't judged too harshly around here.

In fact it happens so often, I wondering if all the posts here saying "of yes - that's right" is some sort of group confirmation bias at work. I wonder if it will be self correcting - and the group later come to the conclusion it was wrong.

valec• 5 years ago

the A-10 is actually the perfect "fighter mafia" plane aside from its weight.

the fighter mafia basically wanted more maneuverability, cheaper planes and CAS than interdiction bombing. A-10 is all of those except light.

they were vehemently opposed to optimizing planes for beyond visual range (BVR) combat like by improving sensors or stealth because they considered it "a fantasy."

problem is missiles fired 100 miles away don't care what you consider fantastical.

the A-10 is actually a giant hunk of junk outside of COIN operations. it has no stealth, it's slow and its gun is useless against modern armor. against terrorists in flipflops with AKs it can be useful but that's only because they don't have any sort of AA. even stingers are a huge problem. and in an uncontested airspace you may as well bring in a plane with even more firepower and loiter time like an ac-130.

so basically the a-10 in this day and age is a solution in search of a problem. it's big, slow, heavy and would be shot out of the sky in a peer confrontation before you could even blink. its gun is useless against modern tanks and an f-35 can carry a similar amount of munitions.

varjag• 5 years ago

The only reason A-10 is still flying is gun fetishism of certain senators.

monocasa• 5 years ago

I'd go the opposite direction, that an A-10 is a great plane for the kinds of wars America has fought for the past few decades. Until your enemies are BVR, it doesn't make sense for you to have a really sweet BVR plane. It's a flying infantry support tank, and it being scary and loud as it flies by after wreaking havoc as a psychological weapon is half the point.

Yeah, maybe a low flying AC-130 hits the same niche, but we only about twenty or so AC-130s versus almost 300 A-10s in active service.

baq• 5 years ago

it's a flying tank, not a fighter. it shouldn't even belong in the air force. ground troops love it, it should fly for the army with AF doing what AF usually does, which is flying fast, high and stealthy if possible.

rjsw• 5 years ago

The A-10 is too slow even for COIN operations, it can't get to where it is needed fast enough. The most effective smart bomb truck right now is the B-1B. It is fast, has long endurance, large payload and can designate targets itself.

ryderfast• 5 years ago

Usefulness of the A-10? The aircraft that was pulled from the early stages of the Gulf war for getting shot up too many times, is notorious for blue on blue, and immediately dies in the presence of any modern Anti Air?

failuser3• 5 years ago

Sure, but US is was not facing modern anti-air in Iraq and Afghanistan regular Iraq forces were destroyed in 2003. On the other hand, a Reaper drone is perfect to bomb a wedding that’s not protected by AAA

VLM• 5 years ago

the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10

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

Inevitably we will someday go up against an opponent that is willing to take BVR RoE risks and is capable and willing to do ADA (anti-aircraft guns and missiles). At that point the drones and A-10s are simply out of the fight, in fact the entire Air Force is out of the fight until either another procurement cycle or hope that the ground Army, despite having no air support at all, somehow knocks out the opfor so our undefended planes can fly again.

That's why we have a doctrine, however uncool to talk about, of keeping BVR-proof and ADA-proof weapons systems around, there is a situation where they're quite useful.

Really its not even ADA-proof, its more generically "capable of operating in an environment where we do not already have total utter complete air supremacy".

There is a logistical theory that air supremacy is so expensive that nobody but the USA can sustain it, although it goes guarantee huge USA losses until supremacy is lost, so that's not really politically viable. "They're going to wipe our ground forces out by air and there's nothing we can do about it until they run out of armament" is something that's supposed to happen to other nations, not the US, so its a very hard sell politically.

renewiltord4• 5 years ago

BVR = Beyond Visual Range (37+ km missile)

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

lifeisstillgood2• 5 years ago

what are "BVR-proof and ADA-proof weapons systems". Are there planes that can survive being shot at by air defence? Or can evade missiles ? (Is this "stealth" as the answer? If so it seems the war is based on the targetting / anti-targetting arms race?)

I am not trolling - just asking as it does seem that all the advantages are with cheap missiles hunting expensive planes (a very similar situation to naval warfare I believe)

I think I am asking for a good primer on modern warfare ... I suspect it is a contentious subject.

1cvmask2• 5 years ago

The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/10/why-nothing-even-the-air...

Meanwhile corporates are groups and when they fail we call it creative destruction in Schumpeter's words or nowadays disruption.

krapht2• 5 years ago

The A-10 is truly remarkable as are the drones. Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

No.

zweifuss• 5 years ago

Meanwhile the F35 is an overpriced hangar queen that should never have been built (the F22 is a solid stealth plane).

From what I read, the F-22 is the hangar queen. F-35 can do several supersonic missions per day and is not afraid of rain. It is overpriced, though.

scarier• 5 years ago

Now, the US military is struggling with the "Fighter Mafia", which tends to run the USAF despite the ascendancy of drones and the usefulness of the A-10.

Duuuuude, the Fighter Mafia was active in like the '60s and '70s, and some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft). Do you have any evidence that current USAF strategic policy is dictated by the fighter community? Fighter pilots have lamented the loss of "l'audace" for decades, but despite their bravado I don't think any of them really believe that they deserve absolute strategic primacy.

Grambo• 5 years ago

There was a recent story about the Air Force trying to kill off one of their most cost effective aircraft, whether that's evidence of a "fighter mafia" or not is debatable, but it does show the USAF's proclivity for expensive high-tech over cost effective platforms.

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-reaper-drone-retir...

Animats2• 5 years ago

some of its members were involved in the design of the A-10 (in line with their strong advocacy against multirole aircraft).

That was John Boyd, the fighter jock's fighter jock. He pushed for both the F-16, for air-to-air combat, and the A-10, for after the F-16 has cleared the sky.

AtlasBarfed• 5 years ago

I love the A-10, but it is really only useful in places like Afghanistan where you have air superiority, combined arms, artillery, mobile infantry, and the enemy is farm boys with AK-47s.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't think we should discontinue it, because man we do a lot of oppression of teenagers with AK-47s in the last 50 years. Really the US Military should have an "occupation and oppression" service branch if they were honest, with the counter insurgency, A-10s, helicopters, urban warfare infantry, snipers, drones, etc. It could be equipment that is 10 years old, or simply very cheap versions of more expensive stuff used by the branches that presumably exist to fight a peer state.

This post was brought to you in the spirit of "the war nerd".

But they'd never be that honest.

MagnumOpus• 5 years ago

"occupation and oppression" service branch

The USMC is planned to become that, no? No tanks or artillery anymore and very few jets, but instead lots of helos and drones and mortars and MRAP cars and landing equipment for suppressing insurgents anywhere in the world.

(Not even kidding...)

lazide• 5 years ago

The more the change is forced from the outside - either through someone who has them by the purse strings, or by existential threat of death (complete military defeat in the field), the more at stake and the more it is fought. It isn’t impossible however.

But it isn’t like Hitler was waving a white flag and being contrite. I can’t say he was wrong that death was the easy way out with the situation that he had made.

In my experience, the more negative the communication/power style, the more all or nothing the internal politics of the organization tend to be, and the less likely ‘gentle’ change can happen.

Admitting an error in a leader even in most considered positive medium to large organizations is considered a complete failure requiring their removal. At the nation state level, very few countries let a national leader even bow out without the next in line trying to throw them in jail or execute them.

Good luck having a productive shift in policy in that case instead of ‘we WILL make it work’ - including lining people against the wall if they don’t agree.

hollerith• 5 years ago

You had me till "A-10", which has become completely useless except against adversaries like ISIS that none of the modern military powers like.

jschveibinz2• 5 years ago

I can’t agree more with this post. This brings to mind some Milton Friedman quotes:

* Governments never learn. Only people learn.

* One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

* He moves fastest who moves alone.

* Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own…

* It's always so attractive to be able to do good at someone else’s expense.

tehjoker2• 5 years ago

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

It's useful to remember what Friedman's advice did to Chile when he supported the Pinochet regime.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-i...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/ma...

jschveibinz2• 5 years ago

Just to clarify, Milton Friedman most likely did not “support” the Pinochet regime. Here is another article on the topic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2008/07/milton-...

Nevertheless, Friedman’s words stand on their own, and I thought that the addition of the quotes worked well with the post. I am not making political statements, because I don’t find them to be appropriate for HN. Peace.

wussboy• 5 years ago

But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years. And the advantages of small groups over individuals are so comprehensive they have been a primary source of evolutionary progress in humans.

I'm not sure Friedman knew what he was talking about.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 5 years ago

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

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

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

EdwardDiego• 5 years ago

Friedman was an economist who worked closely with Reagan, if I recall correctly, I'm not surprised he also liked to trot out a "social security bad" soundbite.

Talanes• 5 years ago

* Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own…

That is definitely not true for me. I actually feel responsibility if it's not my money, while I can let myself off the hook for any personal indiscretion far too easily.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 5 years ago

Governments never learn. Only people learn.

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

karaterobot• 5 years ago

Groups never admit failure.
A group will never admit they were wrong.

I liked this essay, but it seems like they combined these two observations together with their example about the non-profit. Failure and wrongness are not the same thing.

In their main example, it seems like the company did not admit when they had failed at their goals, and the solution to that is to measure the goals and be accountable. But they also did not question whether those goals were the wrong ones to pursue in the first place. Metrics would not improve that, and many for-profit companies run into that reality even while improving their KPIs quarter over quarter.

I would have liked that distinction to be teased out a little more.

In my experience, it's way easier to get a group to admit they have failed. Failure, after all, is only temporary, and often a reason to raise more funding. What's hard is to get groups to say "we need to question if we're working on the right problem", because that is an existential threat to the organization itself. People will fight hard not to change that: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," etc. etc.

m0llusk• 5 years ago

Apple was forced to admit that its efforts to develop a next generation operating system failed so they looked around and after considering both BeOS and NeXT Apple bought NeXT and began work on what would be called Mac OS X which is what many of you used to read this.

DantesKite• 5 years ago

I feel the same way about charities. There are some great ones out there, but I think it takes a special culture and unique circumstances to not eventually be corrupted by bad actors.

I still feel if you want to change the world, one of the best ways is to build an ethical business.

smugglerFlynn2• 5 years ago

This article reads like an anecdotal rant.

Groups never admit failure.
I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

First statement does not follow from the second. The rest of the article is even worse in its sudden jumps to conclusions.

clpm4j• 5 years ago

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

smugglerFlynn2• 5 years ago

A piece that has no facts backing the point, which exploits confirmation and conformity biases in readers, is just a badly researched and biased piece, regardless of author.

dragontamer2• 5 years ago

It took a lot of effort, but Japan's Meiji Era civil war was a big one.

The Samurai Class said: "This system is not good, and look over there, battleships from Western Nations are on our shore. Time to modernize and industrialize, and time to retire the Samurai system".

Of course, the other half of the Samurai argued otherwise and thus the civil war started. Turns out that the side that chose guns and industrialization won.

----------

Arguably, every revolution and civil war was basically a group deciding that the old way was bad and that some new way was better. But the Meiji Restoration is perhaps the most striking example in the past 200 years.

Yes, the "schism" happened as per the blogpost. But the schism was fixed and Japan was reunited, fighting as a united front in the Russo-Japanese war... proving that Japan had in fact become a modern world power.

HPsquared• 5 years ago

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

dragontamer2• 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

------

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

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

jameslk• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Just because the author can't think of an example doesn't make it true.

In fact groups of people, typically businesses, admit failure all the time. And it doesn't follow that this causes a "schism"

Isn't Y-Combinator all about failing fast and pivots? Funny to see such a silly notion here of all places.

notJim• 5 years ago

I think there's also the difference between admitting failure and admitting failure publicly. Lots of groups will admit failure internally, but there's often not a good reason to admit failure publicly, because your adversaries will use it against you.

pphysch4• 5 years ago

The article isn't about PR though. It's more about internal admissions of failure.

renewiltord4• 5 years ago

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

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

azinman22• 5 years ago

And did they prosper? There's a cosmic sized gap from a billion dollar idea and actually obtaining a billion dollars.

azinman22• 5 years ago

Without it the blog post is less interesting. Having listened to Naval on Clubhouse he's extremely confident in everything he says (/said on Clubhouse, which was largely political/covid/government/society/extremely broad categories). For people to find you interesting, unfortunately you usually need to project such confidence even if it's not technically true.

xpe2• 5 years ago

Without it the blog post is less interesting.

I disagree.

When I see the author's exaggeration and overconfidence, coupled with a lack of examples, I stop reading. It reminds me of driving by a paper mill. Memorable, yes, in the wrong sort of way. I'll remember to avoid it in the future.

I don't dig the writing. I find it uninteresting and unpersuasive. An author does not have to exaggerate to be interesting. Even a dry scientific article can punch you in the face. Isn't that interesting? Perhaps impact and exaggeration are inversely related. Perhaps become exaggeration is easy and overused.

There is a time and place for exaggeration, sure. However, a skilled writer has many varied tools: metaphor, details, humor, and much more.

There isn't one formula to good writing, certainly, but what I'm seeing here misses the mark.

pphysch4• 5 years ago

One of the best contemporary counterexamples, and incidentally one of the largest organizations in the world by official membership, is the Communist Party of China.

A lot of Mao Zedong's policies are viewed as mistakes by the Party, including the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Heck, Mao himself publicly admitted that the GLF was a mistake for which he takes responsibility.

Yet the CPC, as an organization of millions of individuals, didn't implode and remains as formidable as ever.

There are a lot of reasons for this, not least China having 5000 years experience with running civilization-scale groups.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

A lot of Mao Zedong's policies are viewed as mistakes by the Party, including the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Heck, Mao himself publicly admitted that the GLF was a mistake for which he takes responsibility.

My impression, from talking to modern Chinese people, is that the Cultural Revolution is viewed as a mistake, and the Great Leap Forward is not. The Great Leap Forward is viewed as having suffered from inclement weather.

I tend to suspect that this reflects current party orthodoxy.

There are a lot of reasons for this, not least China having 5000 years experience with running civilization-scale groups.

That would make the comparison groups Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. Plus a much weaker argument for Pakistan.

How formidable are those governments, compared to the government of China?

pototo666• 5 years ago

The CCP under XiaoPing Deng creates indeed a schism. It no longer takes communism seriously. Its legitmacy comes from economic growth, rather than from whatever Mao cared.

rasz• 5 years ago

Just yesterday I stumbled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace Doesnt sound like Mao was that hot on admitting failure.

hnfong• 5 years ago

I think the author was implicitly referring to loosely organized groups instead of dictatorships. In groups with strong leaderships, instead of being like a "group", they are more like a bunch of organized people following a (small number of) leader(s), in which case the risk of schism is less pronounced.

nathanyz• 5 years ago

Probably more correct to say that: "A group never admits they are wrong about the core identifying belief that defines the group"

Groups admit being wrong about non-core beliefs all of the time. But of course if you look at the core belief that actually categorizes whether you are in the group or not, then it cannot admit being wrong or else it ceases to exist.

Having said that, I think the author is really making a silly point to say that a group defined by a core belief CANNOT admit that its core belief is wrong. Kind of obvious when expanded to its more verbose form.

pcthrowaway• 5 years ago

I'm thinking about how Germans post-WW2 generally were greatly embarrassed for their mistakes during the war. Of course, it probably helps that the former government was removed and many of the officials put on trial.

enkid• 5 years ago

Now that is something that is true for people as well as groups. That's why it's so important to be careful how you assign your identity.

noobermin• 5 years ago

This is such an ignorant perspective, it really makes me mad. Literally a google search will provide hosts of examples of groups admitting they were wrong and ironically many for-profit companies not admitting they were wrong. It's amazing how someone can be ignorant of history, make a pronouncement that justifies their priors and think they have reached some sort of enlightenment. There is this whole constellation of hustler mindset puff pieces like this that often spout "insight" without really having an actual critical perspective, but don the air of "criticizing most people think" as if that makes them critical.

Ironically it's often due to a lack of seeing feedback, a mechanism of the same kind the author criticizes groups of! Or perhaps cognitive biases.

GauntletWizard• 5 years ago

The Rationalist community in particular is very good at rationalizing.

abdullahkhalids• 5 years ago

You are welcome to share a couple of prominent examples.

Mulpze15• 5 years ago

Sports teams. Many admit failures collectively. Not always for sure, depending on the circumstances, but it happens very frequently. Small group though.

mccorrinall• 5 years ago

Bitcoin doesn’t suddenly say, “We should have smart contracts.”

Bitcoin does support certain smart contracts, but it just isn’t trying to be a world VM like ETH and instead tries to emulate cash plus a few features.

I agree with the rest though.

jancsika• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Is this supposed to be satire?

The Linux kernel mailing list is full of admissions from most of the subsystem maintainers talking about past failures. In fact, their strongest arguments for avoiding new commits is essentially that the changes smell like some of their past failures. Look at the kdbus thread. I'm certain I've also seen some ranting about untangling code related to CORBA as well.

Frankly, if an organization were more critical of ongoing fuckups and failures than the Linux maintainers, you'd have to question their core competency.

And Debian! What about the Debian dev who removed entropy from their key generator? Again, if Debian had a more egregious admission of systemic failure it probably wouldn't exist as a distro today.

Even cranks on HN don't attempt a steel man that fucking up the GPG key generation somehow wasn't a failure. Instead, cranks speculate about whether some super secret spy was recruited to introduce a "subtle" change that would have been laughed out of the room if anyone had bothered to directly ask an openssl dev about it.

Now let's commence HN cranks attempting to steel man a novel argument that two of the most prominently discussed groups on HN aren't actually groups.

Edit: also notice that Debian did not fork after the GPG key generation/valgrind patch debacle. AFAICT they released a statement saying, "All your Base from the past several years belong to script kiddies." One could argue that they didn't take the right steps to fix their process going forward. But one cannot argue that they didn't admit failure.

fictionfuture• 5 years ago

I think you misunderstood his point.

He's making an observation about religious tendencies and belief systems within groups.

Debates within the Linux ecosystem aren't fundamental challenges to it's ethos

native_samples6• 5 years ago

They admit some failures that are not core to the group's existence.

A better example for Linux would be a failure to admit that GPLd / non-stable driver API killed any chances for Linux to succeed on the desktop. Even though theoretically everyone in that community wants desktop Linux to succeed they won't give up their core beliefs to allow it, with the result that the desktop remains dominated by Microsoft and Apple. Meanwhile the Linux world has its own driver schism in the form of Android, which has changed how drivers work totally in project Treble to be user-space and more microkernel oriented.

femiagbabiaka2• 5 years ago

there are a lot of funny passages in here, but this one really made me laugh:

If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality. Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They’re self-sustainable. You’re not out there with a begging bowl all the time.

Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great examples of for-profit industries that are almost always insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out there with a begging bowl."

irchans• 5 years ago

It's interesting to me that you include the Tech industry. I am familiar with bailouts for the auto and financial industry. In what way is the Tech industry "insulated from feedback"?

femiagbabiaka2• 5 years ago

Venture capital is at its core a vehicle to shield businesses while they’re figuring out PMF — aka, figuring out how to turn ideas into money. At the scale that it operates at today it’s barely distinguishable from bailouts — I’m thinking of examples like Uber and WeWork.

colechristensen• 5 years ago

Tech, finance, and the automotive industry are three great examples of for-profit industries that are almost always insulated from feedback from reality and are constantly "out there with a begging bowl."

And with all three what's missing is competition.

When you get big enough competition stops existing and quality stops mattering for a very long time. You can only fail because you're awful at what you do when you're small. Get big enough and you can just buy out anybody better than you.

rectang• 5 years ago

The article starts with a shoddy overreach about group dynamics, countered by countless exceptions raised on this page where groups in fact self-correct.

Then it continues with a howler about the supposed "sustainability" of for-profit enterprise. The engine behind the success of marketplace capitalism is creative destruction! In a healthy marketplace for-profit entities must constantly compete to stay alive, and those that can't adapt die because they are not sustainable.

There's something to the idea that groups are reluctant to change course, but we aren't learning anything about it from this article, which chose to go down the path of ideological screed.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints. What's ironic is that it appears in a public environment in which groups are changing their viewpoints, often quite publicly. Many are taking extreme heat for this.

Technical projects and groups are adopting codes of conduct and behaviour, changing stances on what had long been accepted.

Companies are similarly changing their views on what types of behaviour are considered acceptable amongst both staff and leadership.

The high court of the United States just heard a case in which it seems highly likely that it will substantially change its collective mind over a decision it had made some 50 years ago.

The two major political parties of the United States have, over the course of some 60 or so years, virtually completely changed their respective stances on racial equality and civil rights. Not a fast change, but a profound one.

The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier condemnations and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the conviction of Galileo.

Scientific bodies and disciplines change their mind, preferably based on evidence, all the time. It's what science is. A remarkable case was the development of the theory of plate tectonics from a radical fringe concept to the central organising principle of geology, from 1915 to 1965.

We're in the midst of an onging attempt to change collective understanding, and response to the overwhelmingly evident fact of anthropogenic global warming as a consequence of fossil fuel use.

Reputable news and media organisations report on their own errors and omissions on an ongoing basis.

The most durable institutions in the world are not commercial entities (the five-year failure rate of new enterprises is about 50%). Rather, they are not-for-profit service organisations and institutions, typically schools. The oldest universities date back over 1,000 years, and there are primary schools dating to before the year 1.

And the field of economics has been in the process of admitting the failure of free-market absolutism, or even of free markets as anything other than a special case, for over 150 years.

Groups are resistant to change, yes, but they are not absolutely incapable of it.

Arguing against facts is quite easy where one doesn't bother to consult them.

didibus2• 5 years ago

This could just be about the scope you attach to a group. If the composition of the group changes is it still the same group?

I feel most of the changes you mentioned saw a churn in the members of the groups themselves.

Also, the article mentions changes can happen but not without a schism, which I feel most of your examples demonstrate that a schism is happening.

bartread2• 5 years ago

The Catholic Church has reversed itself on earlier condemnations and beliefs, notably of heliocentrism and the conviction of Galileo.

But nobody changed their minds or admitted a mistake: people just died or retired and were replaced by different people who thought differently.

The content of the post makes it obvious that it's discussing the actions and decisions of groups over much shorter periods of time: i.e., within a single human lifetime, and actually within quite a small portion of a lifetime, because it's talking about outcomes of funded projects and how they're viewed.

arch-ninja• 5 years ago

The conviction of Galileo is actually pretty funny; it took a few decades _after landing on the moon_ for the church to apologize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair#Modern_Catholic...

That's some sinful pride right there.

lodi• 5 years ago

The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints.

Actually the principal claim is that "a group will never admit they were wrong." I think I agree with both claims.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

The general domain is group conflict and change. There's a literature on that. Naval's failed to acknowledge its existence, let alone consult it.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=7,39&qsp=2&q...

Changing a change of mind is a subset of admitting error. Naval's claim is an absolute ("never"), and a single counterexample serves as a sufficient disproof.

I've provided multiple.

felipelemos• 5 years ago

The principle claim of this essay is that groups never change their viewpoints.

I understood that the principle claim is that groups never admit publicly that they were wrong. Maybe in reading to much into it, but it is the interpretation I've got. They can, and actually do change, but it is always a "path of victory". And in the few cases that they admit they were wrong is to gain an advantage or when they are forced to: To appear humble, to pivot to a trending opinion before the "other side" do (and usually after a huge pressure).

We have several examples of this: Microsoft with Linux (now Linux is trendy, they want to embrace the developers that code on Mac, and so on), Germany after WWII (decided by the allies in the Postdam conference), or any political party that ever existed.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

The rant's punchline is "If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality."

It could be rewritten to say what you're noting. That would be an entirely different essay, however, and not what was submitted here.

Mind: I'd also find more agreement with that view. It is not, however, the one that was presented.

geodel2• 5 years ago

I guess it was pretty clear that group views meant same people in that group over a period. What you are talking is simply about large organizations where many people or even generations of people have come and gone and obviously held different viewpoint.

Your comment is typical example of arguing over completely different point and then claim as counterexample to original argument.

posix863• 5 years ago

At least some of the examples might be explained by _new groups_ taking over _old brands_, no? This would result in the group seemingly change its beliefs, when in reality, it has been replaced.

Take the cathlic church. Say some people realize that the geocentrism is wrong. You have the option of either splitting off and starting something from scratch; or, if you have the option, you launch a coup, and replace the people in the cathlic church, effectively changing the group, but still seeming as the "cathlic church" from anyone outside.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29490893

overshadow• 5 years ago

This happens in crypto land, too, where the coins fork

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

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

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

catsarebetter• 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

Ok back to work

brian_cunnie• 5 years ago

Groups Never Admit Failure

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

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

tshaddox• 5 years ago

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

dahart3• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Germany openly regrets Nazis and Hitler. In the US we admit that letting McCarthy run amok was a huge mistake. Globally billions of people admit that we were wrong to let short term economic interests steam-roll the environment for the last century.

This article feels like a “my logical-to-me sounding hypothesis must be true because I haven’t thought of any counter-examples” rationalization. It doesn’t examine any cases of groups admitting being wrong, and there are lots in history. It doesn’t ask the question why is a group being wrong is a legitimately harder conclusion to come to, even from people external to the group. There usually are debates and individuals causing things to go one way or another.

akdor1154• 5 years ago

Germany openly regrets Nazis and Hitler.

If you were looking for the least-subtle example of the author's schism theory, i think you found it. :)

Though I get your point - maybe the missing piece is "a schism will split the group... but in the very long term, it might be healed."

dahart3• 5 years ago

Not sure I’d agree Germany ever split or experienced a schism. It went one way for a while, then another, and the group as a whole admits not wanting to repeat it.

PaulDavisThe1st5• 5 years ago

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

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

dahart3• 5 years ago

You make a good point. In my defense, I was thinking of McCarthyism and the feature that it conducted mock trials, committed character assassinations, and accused people of being guilty by association. A lot of that has been quite roundly condemned by “us”, by which I mean the courts (including the Supreme Court), governments, historians, and the public. Even if some of the politics live on, and even if there are splinter groups who would do it again, I feel like it’s fair to say a solid majority of our group does admit the tactics of McCarthyism were an error, no?

yboris• 5 years ago

Counterpoint: GiveWell has a link "Our Mistakes" directly on the main navigation bar!

https://www.givewell.org/about/our-mistakes

It's beautiful to see such behavior <3

danr4• 5 years ago

Amazing. Thanks for sharing.

BurnGpuBurn• 5 years ago

Looks great, although all their mistakes are minor process mistakes. They never admit something like "We gave these guys money but they wasted it, so we shouldn't have".

didibus2• 5 years ago

But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that are for-profit, sustainable and ethical so you can attract the best people. You can sustain it because it’s a mission and it’s not just about the money—because there are diminishing returns to making money. There’s a diminishing marginal utility to the money in your life

This is ideological, in practice, just like non-profit fail to be profitable, for-profit fail to be ethical.

yannoninator• 5 years ago

Groups never admit failure.
A group will never admit they were wrong.

ConstitutionDAO tried to buy the US Constitution. When the auction ended there was a large Twitter spaces group that mistakenly celebrated CDAO's 'win' in the auction.

However, when it was revealed that CDAO actually lost the bid, the Twitter spaces group admitted they were wrong and that CDAO failed and then announced it to everyone in the group. [0]

This group admitted failure.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxd5z9/chaos-reigns-as-const...

timdaub• 5 years ago

haha so Naval even writes his name first when he starts a blog post:

Naval: Groups never admit failure. A group would...

motohagiography• 5 years ago

I might suggest Naval misunderstands what it means to manage something (which is funny because he's known for being wildly successful at having done so). It's not solving problems, it's extracting value from them. The board he was on congratulated itself because it had managed, e.g. to continue to extract value from whatever cause or dynamic it ostensibly exists to contribute money into. It has no interest in solving problems, as then what would it exist to manage?

This is very close to the cynicism of those who accuse for-profit enterprise as only doing things for money with no care for the people their decisions effect, with the slight modification that it's not so much the money managerialists do it for as the power of continuing to do it, money is just one effect of sustaining a dynamic.

Imo, Naval's generalization succumbs to exceptions because it misses the above point of what these groups and boards are formed to do.

halayli• 5 years ago

Anecdotal at best. Never is too strong of a word here. I was expecting a study to be accompanied by the article given the conviction insinuated in the title.

Groups can come in various shapes and forms but generally they often come with a group leader, and that person can play a major role in defining success/failure.

reggieband• 5 years ago

Reminds me of Kuhn's idea of Paradigm Shift.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift

fumeux_fume• 5 years ago

It's an interesting premise, but does not support the conclusion that for-profit companies are more sustainable than non-profits. Like at all.

Barrin92• 5 years ago

I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

Being German I would like to think that while there's always opportunity to be more introspective about your history over the last few generations we've done an okay job of correcting some historical mistakes, and that's a pretty decently sized group.

If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit

I can only assume that if we'd turned the country into an LLC we'd be even more on the cutting edge of error correcting today. I feel like this post is what happens if you burn every history book and instead shove a diet of a16z podcasts and silicon valley serial entrepreneur biographies through GPT-3

pvg4• 5 years ago

we've done an okay job of correcting some historical mistakes

I don't want to take anything from the generally commendable and impressive German efforts in that regard, as you say, over a period of several generations. At the same time, one has to acknowledge to get there, Germany was physically destroyed, its territory dismembered and occupied, it effectively ceased to exist as a sovereign state for a period, etc, etc. It's not much of an example of a group spontaneously deciding they'd got it wrong.

_carbyau_• 5 years ago

Interestingly though, a trip through germany revealed monuments to the atrocities they committed.

The general idea being that future peoples need to learn from the mistakes of the past.

HanaShiratori3• 5 years ago

Why would anyone, especially a large group spontaneously change one of their core beliefs? Don't you need some kind of trigger event to enforce the change of mind?

renewiltord4• 5 years ago

Well, Germany had to be made to do that. We had to remake the nation into one that has changed its dogma from "we were right" to "we were wrong". The fact that the populace accepted it is awesome, actually, but it needed to be done to them.

ancode• 5 years ago

Pretty sure it took two tries also

atoav2• 5 years ago

There is the theory that Germans accepted this culture of Vergangenheitsbewältigung because of a reason. While I don't necessarily believe this is a 100% true, it would explain the incentives. The theory goes as follows:

How would Germans be able to tell other Europeans what they need to do in which way if they didn't have the moral high ground of Vergangenheitsbewältigung?

While this might not be true for a big chunk of the German population (which is truly horrified by and sorry for the harm their nation caused), it is certainly part of the reson this has been successfully accepted.

atoav2• 5 years ago

However much I like the German way of dealing with the past, I can't shake the suspicion that all of this is not without it's incentives.

As someone living in Germany as well, Germans love to tell others how things are done. This is only possible if you have the moral high ground. Musterschüler an all that.

text70• 5 years ago

GPT-3 looks like the best answer here. There are more than a few outliers I can think of A then B logic as written, which indicates a limited training set database of, like you said, a few podcasts and biographies.

gvhst• 5 years ago

NASA post Apollo 1 fire immediately comes to mind, not quite sure what Naval is on about.

d--b• 5 years ago

This honestly sounds like rumblings one should have at a bar, not on a blog…

No part of the argument is backed by anything but vague personal experience, and the outcome is as far reaching as “for profits are better than non profits”

ndr• 5 years ago

What bar does a blog need to meet?

aeturnum• 5 years ago

Usually what happens in that case is a schism

Pretty sure the "we were wrong" half of the schism is admitting failure. This feels like a "no true scotsman" fallacy. There are certainly going to be people who never change their minds, but there are many, many examples of groups changing their policies to the reverse of what they were (slavery, gay marriage, outlawing inter-racial marriage, etc). Obviously plenty of people disagree with those changes, but OP's view is that the "real" group is only the people who never changed their minds.

foobarbecue2• 5 years ago

I would replace "never" with "rarely." Patagonia is a good example of a company that admits failure -- they talk alot in their publications about finding ecological, moral, and profitability problems with their practices, describing lessons learned and attempts to improve.

I have seen in my work that individual tasks present failures as successes in their final reviews, and I can't think of any examples of a task that admitted "this didn't work out" even though many of the projects I'm thinking of are R&D and really didn't work out at all.

Spivak• 5 years ago

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

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

foobarbecue2• 5 years ago

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

pessimizer• 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

arthurofbabylon• 5 years ago

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

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

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

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

papaver-somnamb• 5 years ago

This is one reason why at the time of group formation I ask that one person be responsible for delivering the desired outcome of the group. By election, by appointment, whatever the circumstances may call for. And, as I learned the hard way, that responsibility needs to be coupled with and balanced by a suitable degree of authority.

TulliusCicero2• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

What would this look like? 100% of members all announcing it at the same time? A simple majority? Just a single leader, or board?

Because if it’s the leader option, that does happen occasionally. And even when groups don’t instantly change their minds, they can change their minds over time and eventually admit they used to be wrong. That does happen.

llamaimperative• 5 years ago

Put another way: “We” didn’t think anything. There is no such thing as a group changing its mind because a group doesn’t have a mind. Each member thought something, probably something slightly different even when they largely agreed, and very often they completely disagreed with one another.

The Naval and Balaji type folks often seem tricked into thinking that organizations are actually atomic entities simply because we talk about them as if they are. They’re abstractions. Abstractions over groups of people who are each individually as complex as you and I are. Easy to forget sometimes!

TulliusCicero2• 5 years ago

Put another way: “We” didn’t think anything. There is no such thing as a group changing its mind because a group doesn’t have a mind.

I mean yeah, but I don't think that's what the author meant. They seem to be saying that groups don't admit failure, not that admitting failure is a definitional impossibility. It's like going, "jellyfish NEVER breastfeed their babies."

aftbit• 5 years ago

I've got an amateur interest in nuclear disasters, and I've noticed an echo between TMI and Fukushima... in both cases, the plants were substantially mismanaged by the electric company, who seemed more interested in downplaying and covering up the issues than in solving them, even as the emergency continued.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Chernobyl also.

You'll also find that mode in numerous "near miss" nuclear accidents, as well as power-plant disasters of other modalities, including the Vaijont and Banqiao dams. Denial of a not-yet-realised risk is a very common failure modality.

Charles Perrow's work in this area, specifically in the role of organisational dysfunction in disasters (Normal Accidents and The Next Catastrophe among other works) is highly recommended.

Rubayo• 5 years ago

Great article!

On and individual level people often won't admit to mistakes either. There is a great book called:

Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts

patrec• 5 years ago

I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

End of the Soviet Union?

mritchie7122• 5 years ago

Did the group in power decide to end it?

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

Yes.

The final round of the Soviet Union's collapse began on December 1, 1991. That day, a Ukrainian popular referendum resulted in 91 percent of Ukraine's voters voting to affirm the independence declaration passed in August and formally secede from the Union. The secession of Ukraine, long second only to Russia in economic and political power, ended any realistic chance of Gorbachev keeping the Soviet Union together even on a limited scale. The leaders of the three Slavic republics, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (formerly Byelorussia), agreed to discuss possible alternatives to the union.

On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus secretly met in Belavezhskaya Pushcha, in western Belarus, and signed the Belavezha Accords, which proclaimed the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and announced formation of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a looser association to take its place. They also invited other republics to join the CIS. Gorbachev called it an unconstitutional coup. However, by this time there was no longer any reasonable doubt that, as the preamble of the Accords put it, "the USSR, as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality, is ceasing its existence."

The final dissolution occurred on 25 December 1991 as General Secretary and President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, resigned and transferred power to Russian Presiden Boris Yeltsin.

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

Aidevah• 5 years ago

No. The faction that opposed Gorbachev tried to halt and reverse his reforms, and the support of the coup was so extensive inside the party that the subsequent purge after the coup seriously weakened the party so that breakup was just a matter of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat...

ultimoo• 5 years ago

Do B Corp organizations fit into this narrative? From what I've read organizations like Allbirds and Sweet Green are B Corps but I don't know much about it beyond that.

normalocity• 5 years ago

I liked the first half of the essay - some interesting nuggets of some possible ideas, particularly the point about schisms forming rather than continued collective action once a group becomes large enough.

The last half sounds a little bit too much like the bias towards markets and profit motives and whatnot without question and without critique. There are plenty of dysfunctional for-profit orgs that don't allocate resources well, in spite of overwhelming feedback, from the market and elsewhere. The majority of for-profit orgs also have a sales team that is out there pounding the pavement trying to drive sales: it's not all, "Build it and they will come."

I don't buy that a successful company needs to be a mission either. That's very common thinking in the startup world, but not even close to representative of the whole.

jzymbaluk• 5 years ago

What is this publication? I can't find an author name or "about us" page on their official website or twitter bio anywhere. I gather this is a blog for the spearhead investment group which they link to on their site, but it is pretty sketchy that there is no information available about who the authors of these essays are.

dredmorbius10• 5 years ago

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

rkk3• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,”

Controversies over the status of historical figures serves as a complete refutation of this piece. Societies and groups values are constantly changing.

failuser3• 5 years ago

Even the worst groups can admit mistakes one funeral at a time unless mistake is their raison d'être.

staplung• 5 years ago

Seems like yet another lesson from Clay Shirky's "A Group is its own Worst Enemy"[1]. From the talk/essay:

  It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group — because what would you be a member of?

  So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is “This is good and must be protected.” And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/technology/2005-shirky-agroupisit...

Sparkyte• 5 years ago

I with my team always admit failure as progress, because it is impossible proceed without failure being the catalyst toward success. To succeed without consequence is to learn or experience nothing. Failure while bad is its own reward.

pojzon• 5 years ago

How does that fit into IT team landscale ?

Do teams of developers that built something together but is not what was really needed gonna admit they made a mistake? Or just gonna iteratively change to something they should have started with?

u385639• 5 years ago

That a group doesn't treat failure the same way as an individual is practically tautological in the sense that the power of a group vis a vis outcome (whether ~success or ~failure) is precisely that it's not an individual, but a proxy, "holding" it. In other words it makes no sense for a "group" to admit failure - that's why you put the group together, and that's why, generally speaking, not everyone gets fired when shit hits the fan. What is the insight here?

varsketiz• 5 years ago

What about blameless post mortems in many well run companies? Either internally or even externally they are basically admiting mistakes.

Borrible• 5 years ago

Delay, Deny, Defend. In doubt and you can't help, confess to be a miserable wretch, but also a victim of circumstance and heartbreakingly beg for forgiveness.

Not to forget, tell them you have understood your mistakes and will do everything possible to avoid them in the future.

That 'possible' is important next time, you fool them. Just in case they remember last time.

Sometimes it even pays to keep its promises.

http://cssc.uscannenberg.org/cases/v1/v1art6/

mro_name3• 5 years ago

humans are herd animals after all. The herd must be right. Always.

Being reliable (in dire crisis) means being trusted without thought.

Surviving with such firmware is what shaped us.

bacan• 5 years ago

Na, the key imo is having good feedback loops and properly aligning the incentives with the objectives

mro_name3• 5 years ago

I wonder what academia (sociology, anthropology) says about the issue. Any pointers?

dash2• 5 years ago

Janis Ian's "Groupthink" is the obvious one. Then there's the paper "Knee Deep in the Big Muddy" on the sunk costs fallacy. Treated as an individual "bias" but a lot of the examples (e.g. Concorde) come from group projects.

blacksoil• 5 years ago

What immediately come to my mind is companies. When they made mistake they tend to have a specific person to take the blame and apologize. If it's too much, then that particular somebody would (be forced to) resign or get fired. And then life within the company goes on normally as if nothing happened.

netcan• 5 years ago

So.... Ask contributors to any given group project what their contribution was. The total will almost always be >100%. Ask about share of blame, I reckon it will always be <100%.

Organisational culture and group psychology tend to prop up such fallacies, allowing everyone to overestimate and underestimate their contribution to success and failure... these accumulate to organisational fallacies over time. Venkatesh Rao once called the lies cumulating as a result of this "organisational dark matter."

Lies beget lies. If a team is responsible for 180% of the success and 45% of the failure... something has to account for that. External factors played a role. Someone else failed. The project is actually more successful than it is. Etc.

A lot of group psychology is just this... ways of supporting group beliefs.

coolandsmartrr• 5 years ago

Interesting. Peer pressure is very strong in Japan, and the failure to admit failure is considered one of the reasons why Japan lost WWII[1]. Likewise, there are many failures in Japan today, where organizations in general struggle to point out and correct flaws in executive plans. This usually stems from hierarchy, and junior members of orgs experience pressure to accept initiatives set by their seniors.

[1] At least by a Japanese book called "The Essence of Failure" https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4122018331

verisimi• 5 years ago

Most groups will not admit failure. This is because (IMO) we do 'groups' wrong.

What is a group? Its a bunch of individuals that come together to do something.

The problem is that the 'thing' groups come together to do, is different for different individuals. Some people are looking to find completion, some community, some a specific goals, others a series of goals, others want control, others want to learn, etc.

Groups should come together for a specific goals, and then be disbanded when that goal is met or cannot be met. The issue groups do not come together in this way - instead we create a structure that potentially runs in perpetuity (the governance structure is the most egregious example of this.)

If the goals are unclear, if the structure can be hijacked so that one individual is in a position of power over the others, at that point, the group is in conflict - some are winners some are losers. The ostensible goal may end in failure, but only for some in the group. In fact, for the winners, a sort of strung out failure is success! Just look at our political class - the system is failing and no one is happy, but they have converted their parasitic position into a win.

michealr• 5 years ago

Odd connection perhaps, but this book stuck with me about its framing of group changes. Though it only looks at terrorist organisations.

Essentially how the groups changes its positioning, beliefs and modus in the world over a longer time horizon. Seems to be heavily facilitated by attrition and shedding effects, which changes the units of decision making, the people, to have different personality and character profiles over time.

So how group in time X looks at a situation vs how group in time Y looks at a new situation. Excluding the immediate information on what is happening per each situation. An additional big variable to take into account is how external and internal effects have effected attrition, shedding, and new joiners between those two time periods.

The Terrorist Dilemma https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691157214/th...

_xnmw• 5 years ago

See also: design-by-committee, the Bystander effect, Mythical Man Month and other well-known pathologies of group behaviour. A sense of responsibility is only experienced by an individual, not a group. It's also the purpose of a leader -- to own up to failures of the group under their leadership, and speak on behalf of the group -- but this can only happen if the group chooses to invest such power with their leader.

osullivj• 5 years ago

Similarly "all political careers end in failure" [1]. Why? Because, to succeed in politics is to achieve power. And leaders who achieve high office never willingly relinquish it. The excess of self belief that propelled them to the top prevents them seeing their own faults. Hence the greatest value of democracy (IMHO), which is not to chose govts, but to remove them. Term limits are a good idea for the same reason. Exercise for the reader: contrast with autocracies. There are many recent confirmatory examples: Blair, Brown, Trump, May, Sarkozy, Netanyahu. I can only think of two examples of democratic leaders voluntarily leaving office in recent years: David Cameron in 2016 after losing the Brexit vote, and Nelson Mandela, after a single term as president.

[1] Enoch Powell

cies• 5 years ago

A group will never admit they were wrong.

Did you consider Asia? Whole departments apologize, and promise to do better next time. Under pressure, yes, but still they do.

mehdim• 5 years ago

The link between "groups never admit failure" and "non-profit organizations are not sustainable by design" is a little bit too direct and non relevant.

Lots of non-profits make revenues, selling stuff with customers, they just don't pay dividends by design and re-invest everything. So what he says does not apply.

And again, even foundations are at least oriented to hear feedbacks from donators who are their "customers". So it does not apply here.

The only valid point is that yes, group never admit failure as a whole, but the post should have stopped after this

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

I'm sorry to read this. It is very cynical.

It's not necessarily wrong, but I perceive it as inductive reasoning (failure to admit failure means failure, as a whole), that may not apply to many application contexts.

I've been in the NPO world for over 40 years (as a side gig). I have family that have been in it for even longer (as a full-time vocation); with varying degrees of success. I have friends that work at some very famous and effective NPOs.

I've had lots of failure; both individually, and as a member of a team, and we have always admitted it. I have also had what might be perceived, in the for-profit world, as "failure," but was actually a form of success, in the long game.

The same kind of thing can be ascribed to academia, and even to a selection of for-profit endeavors. I have seen this behavior many times in my "day jobs."

That said, the NPO/Academia world is pretty crazy, compared to the neat, clean lines of for-profit organizations. The main currencies tend to be passion, reputation, and ego, as opposed to money, and that leads to some "strange" behavior. Also, people can be quite ... driven, so the fights can be ... invigorating.

fetzu• 5 years ago

Generalizations are always wrong.

No, wait…

scotuswroteus• 5 years ago

This statement is not true

greenie_beans• 5 years ago

the christian church has lasted for a very long time, which would contradict his main point. i can already predict the rebuttal about the church causing harm, but if you wanna raise that point, you should acknowledge the harm caused by for-profit ventures.

also, the first part of the argument brought to mind a few for-profit jobs i’ve worked for, places with the group problem he identifies.

oshiar53-0• 5 years ago

I realized this was because there was no objective feedback. Because there is no loss—it’s all social profit—they couldn’t fail.
If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality.

Why would it be the "best"? Non-profit organisations do have many other ways to have their performance validated and evaluated from "reality" transparently and objectively, just like e.g. a public company.

Sure, non-profit is not sustainable and legally binding etc etc, but the author doesn't provide concrete reason that a specific organisation model serves best for "building a better world." I'm not arguing that non-proft is the "best," but a foundation may receive funding and/or grants from a consortium of various non-profit and for-profit organisations, individuals, and etc.. This does not necessarily make the foundation itself "for-profit." The foundation could operate under critical scrutiny of stakeholders.

If anything, I'd blame the lack of transparency to interested parties (e.g. donors) as the main factor of organisational failure. This applies to both for-profits and non-profits.

nelgaard• 5 years ago

I once knew a man that was campaigning against a proposed metro line because he feared it would be too noisy, harm the environment, scar his neighborhood, etc. One day he organized a walk along the entire proposed path of the new metro line. At the end of the walk, they discussed it and to his own surprise he came to the conclusion that actually it was not that bad after all. His anti-metro group did of course dissolve. I had a lot of respect for him.

notorious-dto• 5 years ago

There's an excellent book, quite relevant, called "Overcoming Organizational Defenses" by Chris Argyris.

Groups never admit failure

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