Systematize Success #4 - Evolution, Risk, Learning, and Prospect Theory

Which levels and types of risk maximise long-term (learning) success?

Hi Friends,

Happy Wednesday!

Risk, Failure, and Learning

Two weeks ago, our baby daughter discovered stair steps. More precisely, that one single step under a doorframe. She immediately started the fascinating venture to climb over that step again and again… and again.

Both my wife and mother-in-law were very nearby (obviously). What I found fascinating were their respective immediate reactions.

My wife jumped to help her so she would not fall.

Her mum said: “Oh, she is so smart!”

I asked that we let her fall.

This is why:

We are programmed to learn

Most reasonably advanced animal brains are learning machines. Some birds have to learn how the stars rotate to be able to orient themselves. Cubs have to learn how to hunt through rough play with their parents and siblings. Humans have to learn… everything.

One of the best books on the subject would most likely How the Brain Works, by Steven Pinker. At least the first part (unless you are keen on learning the fascinating underlying principles to primate vision).

We start learning from the very beginning. Everything babies do (apart from eating and sleeping) is directed towards one unique goal: improving their model of reality. It involves physical reality (objects fall, roll, etc.), self-awareness reality (they can walk, interact with their environment, etc.), and social reality (people come to them when they cry, smile at them when they smile, and generally respond to their stimuli).

Children’s learning experimentation seems more relatable than babies’, but the idea remains the same. The older we get, the more focused we go towards understanding social interactions - unless you regress by going into studying theoretical physics, or worse, abstract math. It is the foundation of our species being an outlier, and the most important factor why our brains evolved to their current level of complexity. Chimps have similar social and political status structure as we do, and their teenagers go through similar self-defining struggle as human ones.

Failure as feedback

You don’t learn without immediate feedback. All behavioural scientists agree with that. That is why habits - good and bad - and addictions, are built on immediate feedback only. Dan Ariely often shares very personal examples of his personal experience having to inject himself with very painful medical treatment. He only managed to do so consistently for months (successfully, unlike most other patients) thanks to his immediate reward technique.

This is why pain has to be immediate as a feedback mechanism. Otherwise, it is impossible for your brain to efficiently internalise what caused the issue. Only with immediate feedback can you reinforce the right behaviour for the following occurrence. It sometimes happens that some babies are born with a very rare medical condition whose symptom is that they can’t feel pain. Feel free to google it, but long story short, it does not help smooth early life development.

This means that to actually learn efficiently, one needs to experience some degree of (immediately) painful failure. For a baby, it means a lot of those. For an adult, most likely less, but certainly not none. The huge advantage that adults have is retrospection. We are one of the very few animals who can think back about a past experience, analyse it, and artificially force themselves to internalise a failure that might not have been obvious on the spot. This is an extraordinary blessing. It is one of the foundations of the agile framework, and applying (objective) retrospections to your personal life is one of the most powerful growth tools out there. Especially if you force yourself to regularly take risks and experience some degree of failure.

Risk of ruin

In last week’s essay, we discussed the non-ergodicity of human life. This is something that has to be taken into the equation. You can’t learn if you are dead. And as my evolutionary psychology professor used to say: “The only reason we are alive is that dead people have very low chances of having children.”

This means that we need to take risks, yes, but better take lots of reasonable risk than a big one that can live us dead or worse. This is also why your appetite for risk decreases when you start having a family depending on you: your upside to taking risks might remain the same, but your downside does not. Ultimate failure no longer impacts you and you only.

This is what we try and avoid for ourselves, but also and most importantly for our children. A young child has zero perception of risk. Worse, they have zero understanding of graduation of risk, and are completely unable to discriminate between good risk, and really, really stupid risk. That is why parents need constant vigilance.

My mother-in-law’s comment should probably have been that her grand-daughter has zero risk-awareness. Of course we think our daughter is smart - anyone thinking bias, we’ll come back to those another time. What was more relevant was the obstination of our daughter to keep practising the same exercise: practice does make perfect.

Risk as perceived by parents

I recently read that parents were far more risk-averse for their children than for themselves, and that it made complete sense from a prospect theory point of view. I agree with the observation, but not with the underlying thinking.

Parent have to behave extremely risk-averse in the first phase of their learning life. Parents still (hopefully) measure risk properly. It is just that their child does not. So both instinct and reason do push parents to inflate their adverse reaction to risk, but only to compensate their child’s not registering risk-of-ruin consequences. Said otherwise, even if my wife is the most amazing mom and knows everything about child development, her instinct is still to prevent our daughter from falling because it might result in bad injury. Sometimes, the distinction can be as innocuous as wooden floor vs. hard tiles. Not easy to integrate that level of graduation on an each-instant-attention basis.

But, once that critical period is passed, it makes absolutely zero sense for parents to be more risk-averse for their children than for themselves. I argue that this behaviour is a pure byproduct of the first phase, but it is certainly not evolved. Hard and cold evolution would want parents to push their children (especially male) to take more risks than they would themselves, because it increases their own evolutionary fitness. I don’t want to do the maths here because it is a bit crude. For those still interested, it is linked to the number of children, parents reproductive timeframe, and extreme skewness of male evolutionary fitness distribution of outcomes - happy to explain via email or in the comments.

In conclusion, not only do we need to be extremely rational in your approach to risk for ourselves, but we also need to fight that bias at least in the exact same way and proportions for our children as per the math, and at most in the exact same way and proportions as per basic moral thinking. Combining both sides of the equation means you should adopt the exact same approach to risk for your children as you would for yourself. At least this last equality makes the approach a bit easier - we only need to learn that proper risk balance once… the tough bit is to transmit that balance to our children.

What you sill can do however is to remove some risks of ruin for them, such as financial ones. The extra complexity it adds is to do this without skewing their own risk perception.

Good luck.

Which risks do you wish you had taken earlier in your life?

Next question: which good ones can you take right now?

Thanks for reading,

V

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