Your Regret’s Rate of Growth Should Go down Over Time
Or, in the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
I went out for dinner last night. I had to decide where to eat, what to wear, how to go there, etc. All of us have to make such choices on a daily basis. These are little choices. They have very little downside even if I make the wrong choice. But there are big choices as well.
When we choose which job offer to take, who to hire, or what city to live in, the consequence are high, and hence regret looms large. Whenever we are presented with a set of options — all of them good — we can easily torture ourselves with the consequences of making the wrong choices.
Regret is the comparison between what would have been the best course of action in hindsight versus what course of action we actually took. It’s the difference between the payoff that could have been obtained by pulling the best strategy, and the payoff actually obtained by following a particular strategy.
Before I get deeper, let me break it to you. No matter how well you bat, you can’t score a century every single time. And no matter how deep you are in your thought, quick in your wit, and prudent in you action, you cannot pull off the best strategy every single time. Hence, you would often meet with regret—both little and huge—during retrospective analysis.
It is virtually impossible to live a life without regret, yes, but if we use the Regret Minimisation Framework (RMF) the next best thing is indeed achievable: living a life with minimal regret.
RMF forces you to think beyond the moment, past all fears and doubts, and consider your decision among the grand scheme of things. Before he decided to start Amazon, Jeff Bezos had a secure and well-paid position at the investment company D. E. Shaw & Co. in New York. Starting an online bookstore in Seattle was going to be a big leap—something that his boss advised him to think about carefully. Bezos recollects:
The framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a Regret Minimisation Framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimised the number of regrets I have.’ I knew that when I was 80 I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. I knew that that would haunt me every day, and so, when I thought about it that way it was an incredibly easy decision.
Turns out, fear of regret can actually be very motivating, especially when you have to make tough decisions. Regret Minimisation Framework forces you to think beyond the moment, past all the fears and doubts that you may be have.
In his famous book Algorithms to Live By, Brian Christian writes about the postulates of the Regret-Minimising Algorithm (the mathematical counterpart of our Regret Minimisation Framework), devised by mathematicians Herbert Robbins and Tze Leung Lai:
First, assuming you’re not omniscient, your total amount of regret will probably never stop increasing, even if you pick the best possible strategy — because even the best strategy isn’t perfect every time. Second, regret will increase at a slower rate if you pick the best strategy than if you pick others; what’s more, with a good strategy regret’s rate of growth will go down over time, as you learn more about the problem and are able to make better choices. Third, and most specifically, the minimum possible regret — again assuming non-omniscience — is regret that increases at a logarithmic rate with every pull of the handle.
Logarithmically increasing regret means that we’ll make as many mistakes in our first year as in the rest of the decade combined. The first decade’s mistakes, in turn, are as many as we’ll make for the rest of the century. This essentially means that you should try new things, experiment as much as possible, but don’t repeat the same mistakes. Over time, as mistakes reduce, so would your regret.
Christian buttons this up by writing:
In general we can’t realistically expect someday to never have any more regrets. But if we’re following a regret-minimising algorithm, every year we can expect to have fewer new regrets than we did the year before.
RMF has close ties with building your Circle of Competence. When you start a new business, you are very likely to make a lot of mistakes. But as times passes, and as you become an expert in the field, your develop your circle of competence, and as long as you are not stupid to repeat mistakes, you are in good hands. It doesn’t guarantee your success, but it does increase your odds.
To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been. — Chester Barnard
A corollary of RMF is optimism. It helps to be optimistic, especially in the face of uncertainty. When you are starting out with your exploration, when most of the terrain is uncharted, assume the best as long as you don’t find any evidence to the contrary. Clearly, exploration would lead to mistakes, and that’s OK at the start.
When starting a business, assume it would be great. In everyday life, you should be excited to meet new people, and try new things. When you do, assume the best about them. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.
Christian writes:
Optimism, they show, can be perfectly rational. By focusing on the best that an option could be, given the evidence obtained so far, these algorithms give a boost to possibilities we know less about. As a consequence, they naturally inject a dose of exploration into the decision-making process, leaping at new options with enthusiasm because any one of them could be the next big thing. The same principle has been used, for instance, by MIT’s Leslie Kaelbling, who builds “optimistic robots” that explore the space around them by boosting the value of uncharted terrain. And it clearly has implications for human lives as well.
Having said that, there’s a huge difference between practical optimism and irrational optimism. When starting out a business, it makes sense to be optimistic about it. It keeps the moral of others along with yours high. But when you find contrary evidence, don’t ignore them.
Also, plan for all contingencies. Bezos had the option from his boss (D.E. Shaw himself) to get back to the firm after trying his stint at building Amazon. He had a safety cushion. If you only have a plan, and if it fails you are likely to become a pauper, it’s not such a good plan after all—as the risk of regret is tremendously high. Be an optimist, just not a blind one.
Timeless Wisdom
How hard you’re working isn’t a good indicator of the value you’re creating or the progress you’re making. It’s a vanity metric.
Just as how many Twitter followers you have is a poor measure for the vitality of your business, the amount you’re struggling isn’t a good measure of how much you’re learning and progressing.
“If I work hard at the right thing I can succeed,” is easily misinterpreted as “if I’m struggling, I’m doing the right thing.”
Articles Worth Reading
Being Pretty Is a Privilege, But We Refuse to Acknowledge It — “If I did not look the way I do, then I would not be on TV or on two book covers. I would not have a beauty column or an Instagram with more than 100,000 followers. This does not mean that I have not put in work and effort and done my job well, but my beauty is not something that I earned. I did not work for it, yet it has opened doors for me, allowing me to be seen and heard. And for me to pretend that it does not exist denies the ways in which being perceived as pretty has contributed to my success and made the road a bit smoother.”
The Ethics Of Walking In Cricket — A game of cricket. You are batting. Along comes a delivery down the leg side. You flick at it, miss, and the ball smacks into the keeper’s glove. Except that you didn’t quite miss. You felt the ball just touch your bat. You ought to be out. But the umpire didn’t see the touch, the bowler and keeper haven’t appealed, and, according to the rule book, you are not out unless the umpire says so. Is it your moral duty to alert the umpire, and walk? Here’s what Socrates would advise; and Kant, and Nietzsche.
Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behaviour — “Commuting alone by car is not just bad for the environment (24% of global energy-related CO2 emissions come from transportation), it’s also bad for business. Car commuters report higher levels of stress and lower job satisfaction compared to train commuters — in large part because car commuting can involve driving in traffic and navigating tense road situations. But how can organisations encourage their employees to commute differently?”
Everything Is Amazing, But Nothing Is Ours — The shift to services in the physical economy, access to everything, ownership of nothing, is being replicated at the level of software. What used to be your data, on your computer, becomes a dependency, a call to somebody else’s server. “Files are a bellwether. Our phones are fully in the future: apps are services, and it’s really hard to access the file system. Our computers are still in the past: the two most important navigational anchors on my computer are the desktop and the downloads folder”
Who Needs Literature? — Critical essay asking whether readers are losing their appetite for serious fiction because real life has become so much more interesting. “I have reached the point that a newspaper report interests me more than a literary work. I sometimes fear that all of humankind may sooner or later come to my conclusion that reading fiction is a waste of time. Modern readers are connected to all the corners of the world, and nothing invented by the mind can compare with what takes place in reality”
I Enjoyed Watching
Las Meninas: Is This The Best Painting In History? — I love Nerdwriter’s videos. They are all very thoughtful, and extremely well executed. In this video, he breaks down Diego Valezquez’s Las Meninas. “There maybe no painting in the history of the form more worthy of analysis than Diego Valezquez’s Las Meninas.”
Breaking Down The Genie — The original Aladdin is one of the greatest animated films of all time, and a lot of this is due to the character of Genie. In fact, it’s more so because Genie was voiced by the oh-so-talented Robin Williams. Williams is one among the very few actors who could range from the purely flamboyant (in Good Morning, Vietnam) to the thoroughly thoughtful (in Good Will Hunting), and equally nail both the roles. This video breaks down the making of the Genie, and the man behind this funny, blue, loveable guy who shaped my childhood.
The Report — “In a thriller based on actual events, an idealistic Senate staffer leads an investigation into the CIA’s post-9/11 Detention and Interrogation Program, uncovering the lengths to which the agency went to hide a brutal secret from the American public.” This is an angry and urgent film that rarely raises its voice, smartly conveying inhumanity and injustice without unnecessary drama. This film epitomises the relentless pursuit of truth. I found it thrilling!
Worth Thinking About
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” — Henry Thomas Buckle (Father of Scientific History)
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋