> the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time
In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one example from the Lichess UI:
Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder. But winning probability is a nonlinear function of stockfish centipawns. A drop in 100 centipawns when you're up 15 points isn't a blunder. When the game was equal, it is.
Point is, by the time you know it's a blunder you already know something about the outcome of that move, that it swung the winning probability by more than 14%. So the analysis is kind of just measuring some function of winning probability and saying that it is highly correlated with winning probability.
It's not tautological, though. Your position can gradually deteriorate until it is not salvageable anymore. In that situation we say that the opponent outplayed you.
The fact that the switches in probability occur suddenly is highly relevant. One reason for this could be, that you are able to avoid this type of mistake 90% of the time. So during 9 out of ten moves, nothing changes. Then it does. So in this model, avoiding blunders means honing your skills to be able to apply all aspects of your mistake knowledge all the time. In another game, that is less blunder driven, it might be better to focus on getting more things right most of the time, rather than getting fewer things right all of the time.
At this level, chess is a tactics game. Not a strategy game.
These evaluation-centric definitions of blunder are a bit awkward though.
Traditionally blunders were defined in more player-centric way: player blundered, when he made a mistake obvious enough, that a player of his strength is very unlikely to make. So what is a blunder for a strong player may merely be a mistake for a weaker player.
Problem with evaluation-centric definition is that not all moves that worsen position by 14% are equally obvious - if you hang a queen in one that is certainly a blunder, if you miss a non-trivial sacrificial combination on the other hand...
Maybe a better analogy would be card counting in Blackjack.
To be profitable (if it can be), card counting works with extremely tight margins, like a fraction of a percent per hand. It only turns a profit averaged out over many hands.
But if you make a basic strategy blunder, you can lose the statistical benefits of maybe hundreds of perfectly played hands. That's why it may be better to play a simple strategy perfectly, than a more advanced but error prone strategy.
That's also the reason why casinos love wannabe card counters. Their strategy may work in theory, but because of mistakes, the end result is worse for the player than playing basic strategy.
Note about basic strategy: it is the optimal way of playing blackjack assuming each card draw is independent (so, no card counting), it is simple, and widely available and accepted in casinos. The player is at a loss (of course), but reasonably so. If you can play basic strategy consistently, you are better off than the vast majority of players.
Chess.com is more sophisticated than this in the treatment of blunders. They are divided into “misses” and “blunders”.
In my experience, it appears that the difference between the two is that a “miss” is something the computer evaluates as unreasonable or difficult for a human to find. If you had found it, it would have been deemed a “brilliant” move, which is another analysis move type that chess.com has doesn’t have. Either that or a miss is failing to capitalize on an opponent’s blunder.
It makes sense to chess players, since we consider missing an opportunity to capitalize on an opponent’s mistake to be distinct from unilaterally making one’s own position worse, even though to lichess those are going to both look like drops in the evaluation score.
The "don't blunder" advice applies to sports as well, where you hear it phrased in non-tautological ways frequently, typically something like "you need strong foundations."
Even at the peak of college level, I remember winning and losing games because someone did something that you mostly stopped doing soon after learning the sport, like pass to a teammate who wasn't looking, or fumble the ball in a preventable way, or things like that. Some teams focused on fancy plays and corner cases while their fundamentals still failed frequently, leading to more losses due to bad fundamentals than than wins due to good advanced plays.
That's how I read the "blunders" stuff. There's some small set of a priori known foundations you need which are fairly simple to keep from going wrong, which nonetheless lead to a large portion of failures/points given up/whatever.
It might be tautological, but it also happens to be correct! The Pareto rule applies: A beginner progressing to intermediate might quickly iron out the biggest blunders and by the time they're advanced get 80% there, but mastering that last 20% requires decades of practice.
Also, getting better changes what a blunder is. When I began, hanging my queen was a blunder. Then allowing a discovered check was a blunder. Then allowing the threat of a future discovered check affect my move is a blunder etc.
I think this is very true, I've found the same thing in e.g:
- Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does.
- Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games, getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes.
These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus.
The corresponding insight for building software is this: "Brilliant" ideas for your engineering are probably not the right place to invest energy. Instead you are likely to create more success by ensuring you have excellent testing, qualification, user feedback, monitoring, rollouts, stuff like that.
This also just comes back to investment+return again. If _you_ think you gave great ideas then that's fine. But if you can keep your race/game/project/startup alive and stable then you start to unlock extra "passive income" from your teammates having good ideas (and the latitude to execute them) and your competitors fumbling their opportunities.
So take your ego out of the equation and do the humble stuff first. Don't reward your "rockstar programmers", reward the person who set up the dashboards and the e2e tests and threw up together that spreadsheet of 'most common user complaints'.
A good example would be Elizabeth Swaney[0] who somehow found her way into the 2018 Winter Olympics simply by showing up at qualifying.
In order to qualify for the Olympics, athletes needed to place in the top 30 at either a FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup event or FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, and score a minimum of 50.00 FIS points.[9] Swaney achieved this by attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,[6] with one event in China having fifteen (in which she placed thirteenth). Thirteen of her top 30 finishes were a result of her showing up, not falling, and recording a score
> Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does.
I think this is absolutely true at the lower levels, but once you hit a baseline of consistency, the faster drivers do win races by simply being faster. It can be maddening them trying to recreate their line but still being an entire second per lap slower. But when racing closer to the beginner level, simply being able to complete every lap at a consistent pace does indeed put you at a massive advantage over others.
> These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus.
It is trivially true at all levels - anything that leads you to lose a game can be construed as a mistake, so if you make no mistakes and you lose then the game has been solved (which Chess has not been) or was unwinnable. The mistakes just get smaller and fewer and fewer people can recognise them.
People always tell me they wish they were good at cooking.
The biggest thing is don't mess up.
Don't burn anything, don't undercook it, don't overseason, don't underseason. Even if it's just "okay", if you can avoid ruining food, consistently, people will start to refer to you as a 'good cook'.
Or in another way, just don't be a bad cook and you'll be a good one.
A lot of this is recipe selection too! If you are a beginner, and have people coming over, don't pick a new recipe or a complicated old recipe. Do something easy, especially if you're doubling to feed more mouths.
corollary: Thanksgiving is a day for cooking standards, not innovating (unless you've practiced)
Prep first and follow the recipe. It’s not as hard as it seems if you get all your ingredients ready and then start cooking. It is literally a list of instructions. It tells you what to do. No imagination needed.
It becomes a lot easier to fuck it up if you try to prep on the fly because you’ll never get the timing right, which means you won’t be following the instructions any more.
This neatly encapsulates why (and how) Pabst Blue Ribbon beer plausibly (but never confirmed) won that blue ribbon in 1893: at a time when beer was especially hard to get just right, tasting the same every time is a huge technical win.
Eric Sink from Source Gear made a similar point in a 2005 (I'm so old) essay explaining competition and business topics to developers via sports/game metaphors:
"The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this strategy is that a slam is a high-risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you do it wrong, you give your opponent a point.
Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong player. I can slam the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do. I can beat most other players by simply returning every shot with a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard simply isn't necessary. All I need to do is wait for the other player to make 21 mistakes.
How software is similar
You can beat a lot of competitors by simply not beating yourself. Most companies go out of business because of their own stupid mistakes, not because of the brilliance or strength of their competitor. Stay conservative, and stay in business. Watch the years go by, and you'll be surprised how many of your competitors come and go."
Very good metaphor. I score similarly in Rainbow 6 Siege, an online FPS game. On the level I play, the game can be very fast paced. Often I score simply because I'm more patient, not because I click more accurately or faster.
Totally unrelated side note, but I was in car sales for almost a decade and was better than top 1% nationwide basically since the first year. Averaging 34 cars a month when national average is 11.
People always asked for advice and in general my advice was "don't shoot yourself in the foot".
Actual particular style or methods aren't that important because whatever style you have will work on some and not on others, so just keep yourself and your pipeline busy with people that are ok with that style.
But don't mess up in a way to loose people. You don't need the world's best opener. You need an opener that doesn't turn people off.
You don't need to be the best more charismatic person, just don't turn people off.
You don't need to be the world strongest closer, just don't turn people off making them get up and leave.
Stop making mistakes, and the rest is usually fine.
Turns out "get the hell out of the way" is very good baseline advice for a lot of situations.
Want to make a sale? Get a customer in the room with a good product, then get the hell out of the way.
Want your team of engineers to build incredible things? Hire good people, then get the hell out of the way.
Its not perfect, it hinges a lot on starting from a good place, but if you're in a situation where everybody in the room wants essentially the same thing (for the project to succeed, for the customer to drive away with a new car, etc), the best thing you can do is simply not interfere with the process that arises organically.
But I am paid by the hour. I make more money if we do the multi year project :-). That big fancy project needs someone to lead it, eh :-). Now I am up a level on the old CV.
Once he started talking about chess, I knew it was going to be a limited view on things.
There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly.
I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how to exploit an opportunity when it arrives.
So in the end, you have to know which game you are currently playing. Some things require "the devil is in the details", and other things you can just fix problems when they arrive (because those problems won't kill your overall progress)
I would argue that startups are more playing the 'exploit opportunities' game and not the 'cover all your bases' game.
For example, a startup shouldn't cover all legal aspects or risks. In the end, when you are generating enough revenue, you can deal with earlier legal mistakes. There are plenty of examples.
When your startup is not exploiting opportunities, no "cover all legal aspects" is going to save it.
As an intermediate Go player, you are given a handicap that your opponent spends the game chipping away. They are on the defensive from move 1, and they have to counterattack. Mostly this comes by making a move that defends against your last move, but puts you in retreat. The game shifts from them answering you to you answering them.
I don’t understand your distinction between types of games. In Chess, your stupid mistake creates an opportunity your opponent can exploit. The failure to exploit an opportunity is itself a mistake.
I guess in Poker there is an element of luck of the deal - is that the kind of opportunity you’re talking about?
> I computed a simple “error score” that includes mistakes while giving blunders more weight: [number of mistakes] × 2*[number of blunders]
This doesn't give blunders more weight..
Multiplication is commutative and associative, so the author's formula is also the same as this one: 2*[number of mistakes] × [number of blunders]
To give more weight to blunders, you could use an exponent, which is a common trick in baseball statistics (SABRmetrics), like this: [number of mistakes] × [number of blunders ^ 1.1]
"Not strategy, not memorizing opening lines, not practicing your end-game technique, not studying the Great Games of History, not drilling with puzzles to get better at tactics,"
"In my games, the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time."
Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their blunder rate.
There are some major misunderstandings about chess amongst the general public. "Wanting to not blunder" and "not blundering" are two very different things.
I remember an in-person rapid tournament, 12m with a 3s increment, I was rated ~1600, playing a lot at the time, reading books, etc. In the first round got matched against the highest rated player there (which is normal, someone has to play them in the first round).
He was an IM, skittish small fellow, something like ~2200 or ~2300, I can't remember. Table 1 was up on a little podium. So we go through the opening, middle-game, and this guy is just sitting back. Solid, non-threatening, relaxed, barely used any time on his clock. I'm sweating, taking ages, nervous, seeing dragons around each corner.
I try reason with myself: look, this guy is in a worse spot than you, he has more to lose, etc. He's waiting for you to make a mistake. He is avoiding exchanges, and making little probing threats, at best. Just breathe, stay in the game, let him attempt an attack! Just keep things solid, and don't blunder!
We go back and forth like this for at best 4 or 5 moves into the middlegame let's say.
His move: he smiles apologetically and takes the rook I just put on an unprotected square his bishop was very clearly hitting. I resign with an embarrassed look and whisper an apology for my stupidity.
My advice to anyone who is feeling too big for their jodhpurs: go study chess as hard as you can, for as long as you like, and then go play a few tournaments. 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with you and then their Mom will make them a sandwich while they move on with their life.
I think this is a case where doing the automated analysis on a large dataset is misleading, because the automated analysis is based on an automated evaluation of how good a move is. Another way of saying "don't blunder" in this context is "choose a move that is not much worse than the best move". That is hardly more useful advice than "choose the best move". The advice "don't blunder" only becomes useful when you can also give advice about how to recognize blunders: "check whether your pieces are hanging", "check whether your opponent has mate in 1", "check for forks". Probably many of the blunders in that dataset are simple things like this, but others are long forcing lines or counterintuitive sacrifices that are difficult to recognize both for you and for your opponent. The computer doesn't distinguish, but it's much easier to improve by focusing on the former than the latter. (obviously to continue to improve you have to do both, but "not hanging pieces" is a lot less work).
I struggle with how I'm supposed to grok this advice, as it feels like a tautology.
E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder, which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the blunder ahead of time in some fashion?
The main caveats I can think of are ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not make a blunder.
A better way to read this is "80% of a not losing strategy". The author agrees with this but buries the lede at the very end of the piece:
"Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter."
I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder.
The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit?
"An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the competition."
It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
This only works where the number of moves is finite, and you can only iterate in lockstep with your opponent: tennis and chess are good examples.
If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead.
A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.
So the advice is "don't make so many small mistakes that it kills you"? and 20% of the time "don't make a fatal mistake". I just don't find this very helpful. Anyone who's worked at a startup already knows (1) it is a daily grind, (2) you don't die as often as you enter a zombie state.
[+] [-] janalsncm|1 year ago|reply
In some sense this is almost tautological. While finding an exact definition for a chess blunder isn't straightforward, here is one example from the Lichess UI:
https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/blob/b527746b179cdde6438...
Basically, if you make a move which decreases your winning probability more than 14% over the best move, that's a blunder. But winning probability is a nonlinear function of stockfish centipawns. A drop in 100 centipawns when you're up 15 points isn't a blunder. When the game was equal, it is.
Point is, by the time you know it's a blunder you already know something about the outcome of that move, that it swung the winning probability by more than 14%. So the analysis is kind of just measuring some function of winning probability and saying that it is highly correlated with winning probability.
[+] [-] Certhas|1 year ago|reply
The fact that the switches in probability occur suddenly is highly relevant. One reason for this could be, that you are able to avoid this type of mistake 90% of the time. So during 9 out of ten moves, nothing changes. Then it does. So in this model, avoiding blunders means honing your skills to be able to apply all aspects of your mistake knowledge all the time. In another game, that is less blunder driven, it might be better to focus on getting more things right most of the time, rather than getting fewer things right all of the time.
At this level, chess is a tactics game. Not a strategy game.
[+] [-] smatija|1 year ago|reply
Traditionally blunders were defined in more player-centric way: player blundered, when he made a mistake obvious enough, that a player of his strength is very unlikely to make. So what is a blunder for a strong player may merely be a mistake for a weaker player.
Problem with evaluation-centric definition is that not all moves that worsen position by 14% are equally obvious - if you hang a queen in one that is certainly a blunder, if you miss a non-trivial sacrificial combination on the other hand...
[+] [-] GuB-42|1 year ago|reply
To be profitable (if it can be), card counting works with extremely tight margins, like a fraction of a percent per hand. It only turns a profit averaged out over many hands.
But if you make a basic strategy blunder, you can lose the statistical benefits of maybe hundreds of perfectly played hands. That's why it may be better to play a simple strategy perfectly, than a more advanced but error prone strategy.
That's also the reason why casinos love wannabe card counters. Their strategy may work in theory, but because of mistakes, the end result is worse for the player than playing basic strategy.
Note about basic strategy: it is the optimal way of playing blackjack assuming each card draw is independent (so, no card counting), it is simple, and widely available and accepted in casinos. The player is at a loss (of course), but reasonably so. If you can play basic strategy consistently, you are better off than the vast majority of players.
[+] [-] mtsyh|1 year ago|reply
In my experience, it appears that the difference between the two is that a “miss” is something the computer evaluates as unreasonable or difficult for a human to find. If you had found it, it would have been deemed a “brilliant” move, which is another analysis move type that chess.com has doesn’t have. Either that or a miss is failing to capitalize on an opponent’s blunder.
It makes sense to chess players, since we consider missing an opportunity to capitalize on an opponent’s mistake to be distinct from unilaterally making one’s own position worse, even though to lichess those are going to both look like drops in the evaluation score.
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|1 year ago|reply
Even at the peak of college level, I remember winning and losing games because someone did something that you mostly stopped doing soon after learning the sport, like pass to a teammate who wasn't looking, or fumble the ball in a preventable way, or things like that. Some teams focused on fancy plays and corner cases while their fundamentals still failed frequently, leading to more losses due to bad fundamentals than than wins due to good advanced plays.
That's how I read the "blunders" stuff. There's some small set of a priori known foundations you need which are fairly simple to keep from going wrong, which nonetheless lead to a large portion of failures/points given up/whatever.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] philipov|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] incorrecthorse|1 year ago|reply
Yes. The interesting property would be the reverse proposition: what percentage of victories are granted by not blundering?
In amateur level chess, that number is very high. That's the point the author was trying to make.
[+] [-] matsemann|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sjducb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bjackman|1 year ago|reply
- Simracing: getting faster doesn't make you win races. Getting more consistent does.
- Squash: getting stronger and faster doesn't make you win games, getting less exhausted does, because you make less mistakes.
These are surely not true when you're at a high level, but for most people it's the right focus.
The corresponding insight for building software is this: "Brilliant" ideas for your engineering are probably not the right place to invest energy. Instead you are likely to create more success by ensuring you have excellent testing, qualification, user feedback, monitoring, rollouts, stuff like that.
This also just comes back to investment+return again. If _you_ think you gave great ideas then that's fine. But if you can keep your race/game/project/startup alive and stable then you start to unlock extra "passive income" from your teammates having good ideas (and the latitude to execute them) and your competitors fumbling their opportunities.
So take your ego out of the equation and do the humble stuff first. Don't reward your "rockstar programmers", reward the person who set up the dashboards and the e2e tests and threw up together that spreadsheet of 'most common user complaints'.
[+] [-] SenHeng|1 year ago|reply
In order to qualify for the Olympics, athletes needed to place in the top 30 at either a FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup event or FIS Freestyle World Ski Championships, and score a minimum of 50.00 FIS points.[9] Swaney achieved this by attending competitions with fewer than thirty participants,[6] with one event in China having fifteen (in which she placed thirteenth). Thirteen of her top 30 finishes were a result of her showing up, not falling, and recording a score
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Swaney
[+] [-] chillfox|1 year ago|reply
I don't know what you mean by high level, but I suspect that avoiding mistakes continues to be very important regardless of level in most things.
I play Marvel Snap in the top 1000 and at that level most of the games comes down to whoever makes a mistake first loses.
[+] [-] sotix|1 year ago|reply
I think this is absolutely true at the lower levels, but once you hit a baseline of consistency, the faster drivers do win races by simply being faster. It can be maddening them trying to recreate their line but still being an entire second per lap slower. But when racing closer to the beginner level, simply being able to complete every lap at a consistent pace does indeed put you at a massive advantage over others.
[+] [-] roenxi|1 year ago|reply
It is trivially true at all levels - anything that leads you to lose a game can be construed as a mistake, so if you make no mistakes and you lose then the game has been solved (which Chess has not been) or was unwinnable. The mistakes just get smaller and fewer and fewer people can recognise them.
[+] [-] blastro|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|1 year ago|reply
The biggest thing is don't mess up.
Don't burn anything, don't undercook it, don't overseason, don't underseason. Even if it's just "okay", if you can avoid ruining food, consistently, people will start to refer to you as a 'good cook'.
Or in another way, just don't be a bad cook and you'll be a good one.
[+] [-] mostly_harmless|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jitl|1 year ago|reply
corollary: Thanksgiving is a day for cooking standards, not innovating (unless you've practiced)
[+] [-] ljm|1 year ago|reply
It becomes a lot easier to fuck it up if you try to prep on the fly because you’ll never get the timing right, which means you won’t be following the instructions any more.
[+] [-] petsfed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RachelF|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|1 year ago|reply
https://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html
"The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this strategy is that a slam is a high-risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you do it wrong, you give your opponent a point.
Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong player. I can slam the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do. I can beat most other players by simply returning every shot with a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard simply isn't necessary. All I need to do is wait for the other player to make 21 mistakes.
How software is similar
You can beat a lot of competitors by simply not beating yourself. Most companies go out of business because of their own stupid mistakes, not because of the brilliance or strength of their competitor. Stay conservative, and stay in business. Watch the years go by, and you'll be surprised how many of your competitors come and go."
[+] [-] npteljes|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] talldatethrow|1 year ago|reply
People always asked for advice and in general my advice was "don't shoot yourself in the foot".
Actual particular style or methods aren't that important because whatever style you have will work on some and not on others, so just keep yourself and your pipeline busy with people that are ok with that style.
But don't mess up in a way to loose people. You don't need the world's best opener. You need an opener that doesn't turn people off.
You don't need to be the best more charismatic person, just don't turn people off.
You don't need to be the world strongest closer, just don't turn people off making them get up and leave.
Stop making mistakes, and the rest is usually fine.
[+] [-] petsfed|1 year ago|reply
Want to make a sale? Get a customer in the room with a good product, then get the hell out of the way.
Want your team of engineers to build incredible things? Hire good people, then get the hell out of the way.
Its not perfect, it hinges a lot on starting from a good place, but if you're in a situation where everybody in the room wants essentially the same thing (for the project to succeed, for the customer to drive away with a new car, etc), the best thing you can do is simply not interfere with the process that arises organically.
[+] [-] spxneo|1 year ago|reply
dont be a turn off dont signal turn off behaviour
[+] [-] rightbyte|1 year ago|reply
You can only afford to work fast when not in a hurry.
If I also take credit for work I've not done I am probably a 1000x dev. Multi year projects shut down in under a hour before they became any trouble.
[+] [-] none_to_remain|1 year ago|reply
Deleting code is much more refined.
Preventing code is sublime.
[+] [-] worddepress|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] koonsolo|1 year ago|reply
There are 2 kinds of games: those that punish mistakes very badly, and those that reward exploited opportunities very richly.
I was never good at games like chess because of this exact same reason: I don't cover all my bases and lose from a stupid oversight. However, I'm pretty good at poker, because I know how to exploit an opportunity when it arrives.
So in the end, you have to know which game you are currently playing. Some things require "the devil is in the details", and other things you can just fix problems when they arrive (because those problems won't kill your overall progress)
I would argue that startups are more playing the 'exploit opportunities' game and not the 'cover all your bases' game.
For example, a startup shouldn't cover all legal aspects or risks. In the end, when you are generating enough revenue, you can deal with earlier legal mistakes. There are plenty of examples.
When your startup is not exploiting opportunities, no "cover all legal aspects" is going to save it.
[+] [-] hinkley|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pratclot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blowski|1 year ago|reply
I guess in Poker there is an element of luck of the deal - is that the kind of opportunity you’re talking about?
[+] [-] upwardbound|1 year ago|reply
This doesn't give blunders more weight..
Multiplication is commutative and associative, so the author's formula is also the same as this one: 2*[number of mistakes] × [number of blunders]
To give more weight to blunders, you could use an exponent, which is a common trick in baseball statistics (SABRmetrics), like this: [number of mistakes] × [number of blunders ^ 1.1]
See e.g. some of the formula concepts invented by Bill James https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_James#Innovations
[+] [-] smartbear|1 year ago|reply
Sorry, that was supposed to be +, not * !
You're right. Just a typo! Now fixed.
[+] [-] rKarpinski|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Omroth|1 year ago|reply
"In my games, the player who committed more blunders lost 86% of the time."
Goodness I wonder what methods one could use to reduce their blunder rate.
[+] [-] sourcepluck|1 year ago|reply
I remember an in-person rapid tournament, 12m with a 3s increment, I was rated ~1600, playing a lot at the time, reading books, etc. In the first round got matched against the highest rated player there (which is normal, someone has to play them in the first round).
He was an IM, skittish small fellow, something like ~2200 or ~2300, I can't remember. Table 1 was up on a little podium. So we go through the opening, middle-game, and this guy is just sitting back. Solid, non-threatening, relaxed, barely used any time on his clock. I'm sweating, taking ages, nervous, seeing dragons around each corner.
I try reason with myself: look, this guy is in a worse spot than you, he has more to lose, etc. He's waiting for you to make a mistake. He is avoiding exchanges, and making little probing threats, at best. Just breathe, stay in the game, let him attempt an attack! Just keep things solid, and don't blunder!
We go back and forth like this for at best 4 or 5 moves into the middlegame let's say.
His move: he smiles apologetically and takes the rook I just put on an unprotected square his bishop was very clearly hitting. I resign with an embarrassed look and whisper an apology for my stupidity.
My advice to anyone who is feeling too big for their jodhpurs: go study chess as hard as you can, for as long as you like, and then go play a few tournaments. 12-year-olds will wipe the floor with you and then their Mom will make them a sandwich while they move on with their life.
[+] [-] topaz0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eggbrain|1 year ago|reply
E.g. with his chess example, I can't see how blundering isn't just a result of a lack of the things he mentions -- practicing technique, drilling puzzles, etc. How can we as amateurs know _not_ to make blunders without knowing _why_ it was a blunder, which usually involves being properly skilled to identify the blunder ahead of time in some fashion?
The main caveats I can think of are ego/recklessness/apathy/emotion, which revolve around not caring about making a blunder, along with distraction/hastiness, which revolve around not having the appropriate mental energy to not make a blunder.
[+] [-] WorkerBee28474|1 year ago|reply
"95th percentile isn't that hard to reach" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22265197 / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560345)
and "How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686997)
[+] [-] kevin_nisbet|1 year ago|reply
As an example, if no one is competing with you, it doesn't matter too much how good you are.
[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|1 year ago|reply
"Is this a fail-safe path? Of course not. Even in chess. The rest of the game does matter."
I also think his framing is somewhat misleading, since the default mindset (Despite his hedging) is that you will win (Or have higher chances) if you don't blunder.
The problem is that winning in startups is often a tail event, which means reducing blunders doesn't have much impact on the overall probability. Is reducing blunders the highest order bit?
"An entrepreneur may look at a successful diner and think that customers are there because of the hip decor on the walls. She sets up a competing diner across the street with better decor only to find that it can't pull any customers away. The highest-order bit isn't the decor. It's actually the cheap but high-quality coffee that customers care most about. Without getting the coffee right, no amount of aesthetics will beat the competition."
https://commoncog.com/highest-order-bit/
The only time this is a winning strategy is if survival has compounding effects. For startups, they tend to be default dead.
This memo by Howard Marks explores the case when survival is actually a winning strategy:
"If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves"
https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/memo/fewer-losers-or...
Reducing blunders is obviously good in any situation, but is it the dealbreaker for startups? It always depends on the context.
[+] [-] zheng_qm|1 year ago|reply
-- Charlie Munger
[+] [-] joss82|1 year ago|reply
If you are a startup, you don't have to wait for your competitors to play before making a move, you can (and must, to survive) make as many moves as you possibly can, to get ahead.
A blunder is not as bad as not making enough great moves.
[+] [-] nocoiner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] skeeter2020|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|1 year ago|reply
Apart from them, games are boring mechanistic jobs.
If the enemy doesn't blunder I start to blunder as I'm getting more and more bored with the game.
If enemy plays bad I also get bored and blunder.
Anything to put the spark back into the activity that was supposed to be engaging.