Two readers got back on e-mail with a similar argument: if judgment comes from experience, doesn't long experience sometimes produce worse judgment—the veteran trapped in a frame that once worked?
Yes. And I used the Merkel example to demonstrate this—decades of experience didn't rescue her judgment; in a sense they built the trap. Experience builds judgment and, left unexamined, calcifies it. The scar tissue that should stay sensitive can harden into armour.
The resolution though isn't a new curriculum—the essay's whole point is that judgment never had one. It's that experience is perishable. So the thing worth carrying forward isn't the accumulated answers. It's the willingness to be wrong again, on purpose, when the situation in front of us isn't the one that taught us. Judgment can't be taught. It also can't be retired.
The Merkel example brings out one of the fascinating aspects about judgement or wisdom: even for people who are experienced and wise, and know their own abilities, there should always be humility, and a recognition of their own biases as a reflection of the particularity of their experiences.
And the humility has to be structural rather than occasional. Merkel's frame had worked for so long it had become invisible to her, just the way things are. The humility that helps is the kind that keeps experience legible as experience rather than letting it harden into simply how the world is.
Experience is a result of both, good judgement and bad judgement.
One does incorporate the impact of previous actions that gave good results apart from those that gave poor results.
So, the SUM of ALL the RESULTS of previous actions / decisions forms the Experience that makes You take the present action / decision. And you could still get poor results (make a Bad Judgement) with Many Years of Experience too. One of the factor is the Change / Disruption / Transformation happening in the World. In the changing world, the experience of previous success (or failure) (or good judgement / bad judgement) may not be relevant today.
A very relatable example is that Parenting today is much, much different today from the Parenting that we experienced as adolescents or young adults. Likewise, being a Teacher in a School, even in India, is very much different from what the Teachers were when you and I went to school 50yrs ago.
So, YOU HAVE TO BE A LIFE-LONG LEARNER - LLL or L3 or L^3 in order to be relevant today and tomorrow.
Trust a fellow engineer to catch the false equation I built my hypothesis on :) You're right, of course: experience is the sum of all the results, the hits as much as the failures. The line overstates the bad on purpose—partly because it's a paraprosdokian and the surprise is the whole joke, but mostly because we're such good students of our successes and such reluctant ones of our failures that the failures need top billing. Correct the equation and nobody will remember the sentence!
Your second point is excellent, though I'd put it slightly differently. It's not that the world changed and we must now learn a new syllabus—because there isn't one, and there never was. Our parents' playbook was already half out of date when they used it on us; we could see the gaps too. Experience has always been perishable. The error—old as parenting itself—is mistaking it for permanent wisdom. The nature and speed of disruption nowadays means that the shelf life of experience has gotten even shorter, so the only thing worth carrying forward is the willingness to be a beginner again. Not back to school in the traditional sense. Back to not knowing. L³, in that sense—good to hear from you, my friend.
I love the point about being a lifelong learner, partly because my father told us many times growing up that the wise man learns from the mistakes of others. One of the valuable things about learning from others' mistakes is that one has the luxury of not being in the situation. I watched older kids get in trouble as young drivers, but since I was only 13 I didn't have the temptation, yet. I had several years of watching what happens with bad judgment behind the wheel. It didn't make me perfect, but I did internalize the experiences of my older brother, and determined myself not to repeat them.
One of the things I learned in my technical career is that developing a deep understanding of the technology is often viewed as wasteful by people who pride themselves on "just getting it done". To get that understanding, one MUST READ, and do it on one's own time. There may be whitepapers on bugs in one's tools, or stories in the trade press about how a new use case for your upcoming product means there may be a dangerous hole in the specification. This is a mindset one might not be taught in engineering school--that problems that are "already solved" may "un-solve" themselves, so to speak!
Hi, Rajesh. As usual, your thoughts stimulate so many of my own.
I was fortunate in my early career to have found the "postmortem" genre of engineering literature, in which failures were carefully developed into case studies that brought out the "lessons learned". Over the ensuing years, I learned the irony of this title: so many potential lessons go unlearned, or are learned but soon forgotten. This is obviously a phenomenon that goes far beyond engineering!
Thanks Chris. The postmortem and its cousin the after-action review are such revealing mechanisms, because they so often fail at the thing they're built for. They're an attempt to manufacture experience for folks who weren't there — to let the next person inherit the scar without the wound.
What they capture well is the observable miss: the signal that was available and ignored, the step that was skipped, the timeline that went wrong. All real, all worth recording. But that's simply the articulable residue of a failure, not the judgment that forms in the person who lived it. The reader of the postmortem learns 'what' went wrong. The one who was in the situation learns to 'feel' the wrongness coming next time. The first is information and it decays, as you say. The second is judgment, and it's the part that can't be recorded.
Which may be why the lessons go unlearned despite everyone's diligence. We keep trying to transfer the wound by transferring the document.
(no manual available) essay of Selective Amnesia dives deep into the Judgement/Experience—a subject most relevant in our Technology Era where Machines are projected to decide,Judge based on their text book knowledge.
MR.RAJESH ACHANTA true to his style,discusses history, neurologically, cognitive processes,psychology and research studies and sticks to his quoted quote—Good judgment is the result of experience. Experience is the result of bad judgment.
To delve deeper,he suggests readers to —Stay with that sentence for a moment.
Well,I for one,am staying with that sentence permanently.
I believe even a writer of a book in swimming can’t swim unless he practices,and,ditto for all things.
जाके पैर न फटे बिवाई, वह क्या जाने पीर पराई ?
———
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger
I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolution’s development of the nervous-system cells that control behavior are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to man’s multiple billions of cells in his brain alone.
Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioral algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ant’s case, the behavioral algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The ant learns a little behavior from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes.
Naturally, the simple ant behavior system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve-system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone given off by a dead ant’s body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvard’s great E.O. Wilson performed one of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases.
Another type of ant demonstrates that the limited brain of ants can be misled by circumstances as well as by clever manipulation from other creatures. The brain of this ant contains a simple behavioral program that directs the ant, when walking, to follow the ant ahead. And when these ants stumble into walking in a big circle, they sometimes walk round and round until they perish.
It seems obvious, to me at least, that the human brain must often operate counterproductively just like the ant’s, from unavoidable oversimplicity in its mental process, albeit usually in trying to solve problems more difficult than those faced by ants that don’t have to design airplanes.
The perception system of man clearly demonstrates just such an unfortunate outcome. Man is easily fooled, either by the cleverly thought out manipulation of man, by circumstances occurring by accident, or by very effective manipulation practices that man has stumbled into during “practice evolution” and kept in place because they work so well. One such outcome is caused by a quantum effect in human perception. If stimulus is kept below a certain level, it does not get through. And, for this reason, a magician was able to make the Statue of Liberty disappear after a certain amount of magician lingo expressed in the dark.
With this introductory instruction from ants, magicians, and the grand general principle of social psychology, I will next simply number and list psychology-based tendencies that, while generally useful, often mislead. (Discussion of errors from each tendency will come later, together with description of some antidotes to errors, followed by some general discussion,omitted).Here are the tendencies:
Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency
Liking/Loving Tendency
Disliking/Hating Tendency
Doubt-Avoidance Tendency
Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
Curiosity Tendency
Kantian Fairness Tendency
Envy/Jealously Tendency
Reciprocation Tendency
Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency
Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial
Excessive Self-Regard Tendency
Overoptimism Tendency
Deprival-Superreaction Tendency
Social-Proof Tendency
Contrast-Misreaction Tendency
Stress-Influence Tendency
Availability-Misweighing Tendency
Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency
Drug-Misinfluence Tendency
Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency
Authority-Misinfluence Tendency
Twaddle Tendency
Reason-Respecting Tendency
Lollapalooza Tendency—The Tendency to Get Extreme Consequences from Confluences of Psychology Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome
———
The Moral Machine is a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. We generate moral dilemmas, where a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians. As an outside observer, people judge which outcome they think is more acceptable. They can then see how their responses compare with other people. If they are feeling creative, people can also design their own scenarios, for others to view, share, and discuss.
(Visit the Moral Machine.)
—————
Wharton researchers have conducted extensive studies on artificial intelligence bias, focusing on generative AI, hiring algorithms, and human decision-making. Key findings show that AI often replicates historical discrimination, that humans struggle to fairly audit these models, and that the biggest risk is not just the bias itself, but blind human trust in it.
Thank You. That couplet is the entire post in one line: जाके पैर न फटे बिवाई, वह क्या जाने पीर पराई. Cracked feet as the price of understanding another's pain. Polanyi spent years reaching for what those few syllables already hold: the knowing that arrives only through the walking.
The E O Wilson experiment in Munger's piece lands exactly where Alan Kay's frog landed last Saturday—the one you pointed me to. The frog starves among paralysed flies and gorges on thrown cardboard, its hardware seeing only small moving shapes and taking that for the whole world. Wilson's ant drags a living, kicking nestmate from the hive because the smell says corpse. Same failure, two species: a simple program run by rote where it was never meant to apply.
But here the paths divide. The ant does it again the next time, and the time after—the program cannot 'feel' its own failure, so nothing changes. What the ant lacks is not intelligence; it is the capacity to be wrong, register the cost, and reorient. That is judgment—the one thing repetition alone can never become, and the one thing a human builds from exactly these failures. Thanks again.
Two readers got back on e-mail with a similar argument: if judgment comes from experience, doesn't long experience sometimes produce worse judgment—the veteran trapped in a frame that once worked?
Yes. And I used the Merkel example to demonstrate this—decades of experience didn't rescue her judgment; in a sense they built the trap. Experience builds judgment and, left unexamined, calcifies it. The scar tissue that should stay sensitive can harden into armour.
The resolution though isn't a new curriculum—the essay's whole point is that judgment never had one. It's that experience is perishable. So the thing worth carrying forward isn't the accumulated answers. It's the willingness to be wrong again, on purpose, when the situation in front of us isn't the one that taught us. Judgment can't be taught. It also can't be retired.
The Merkel example brings out one of the fascinating aspects about judgement or wisdom: even for people who are experienced and wise, and know their own abilities, there should always be humility, and a recognition of their own biases as a reflection of the particularity of their experiences.
And the humility has to be structural rather than occasional. Merkel's frame had worked for so long it had become invisible to her, just the way things are. The humility that helps is the kind that keeps experience legible as experience rather than letting it harden into simply how the world is.
A small improvement from my point of view.
Good Judgement is a result of Experience.
Experience is a result of both, good judgement and bad judgement.
One does incorporate the impact of previous actions that gave good results apart from those that gave poor results.
So, the SUM of ALL the RESULTS of previous actions / decisions forms the Experience that makes You take the present action / decision. And you could still get poor results (make a Bad Judgement) with Many Years of Experience too. One of the factor is the Change / Disruption / Transformation happening in the World. In the changing world, the experience of previous success (or failure) (or good judgement / bad judgement) may not be relevant today.
A very relatable example is that Parenting today is much, much different today from the Parenting that we experienced as adolescents or young adults. Likewise, being a Teacher in a School, even in India, is very much different from what the Teachers were when you and I went to school 50yrs ago.
So, YOU HAVE TO BE A LIFE-LONG LEARNER - LLL or L3 or L^3 in order to be relevant today and tomorrow.
Trust a fellow engineer to catch the false equation I built my hypothesis on :) You're right, of course: experience is the sum of all the results, the hits as much as the failures. The line overstates the bad on purpose—partly because it's a paraprosdokian and the surprise is the whole joke, but mostly because we're such good students of our successes and such reluctant ones of our failures that the failures need top billing. Correct the equation and nobody will remember the sentence!
Your second point is excellent, though I'd put it slightly differently. It's not that the world changed and we must now learn a new syllabus—because there isn't one, and there never was. Our parents' playbook was already half out of date when they used it on us; we could see the gaps too. Experience has always been perishable. The error—old as parenting itself—is mistaking it for permanent wisdom. The nature and speed of disruption nowadays means that the shelf life of experience has gotten even shorter, so the only thing worth carrying forward is the willingness to be a beginner again. Not back to school in the traditional sense. Back to not knowing. L³, in that sense—good to hear from you, my friend.
I love the point about being a lifelong learner, partly because my father told us many times growing up that the wise man learns from the mistakes of others. One of the valuable things about learning from others' mistakes is that one has the luxury of not being in the situation. I watched older kids get in trouble as young drivers, but since I was only 13 I didn't have the temptation, yet. I had several years of watching what happens with bad judgment behind the wheel. It didn't make me perfect, but I did internalize the experiences of my older brother, and determined myself not to repeat them.
One of the things I learned in my technical career is that developing a deep understanding of the technology is often viewed as wasteful by people who pride themselves on "just getting it done". To get that understanding, one MUST READ, and do it on one's own time. There may be whitepapers on bugs in one's tools, or stories in the trade press about how a new use case for your upcoming product means there may be a dangerous hole in the specification. This is a mindset one might not be taught in engineering school--that problems that are "already solved" may "un-solve" themselves, so to speak!
Hi, Rajesh. As usual, your thoughts stimulate so many of my own.
I was fortunate in my early career to have found the "postmortem" genre of engineering literature, in which failures were carefully developed into case studies that brought out the "lessons learned". Over the ensuing years, I learned the irony of this title: so many potential lessons go unlearned, or are learned but soon forgotten. This is obviously a phenomenon that goes far beyond engineering!
Thanks Chris. The postmortem and its cousin the after-action review are such revealing mechanisms, because they so often fail at the thing they're built for. They're an attempt to manufacture experience for folks who weren't there — to let the next person inherit the scar without the wound.
What they capture well is the observable miss: the signal that was available and ignored, the step that was skipped, the timeline that went wrong. All real, all worth recording. But that's simply the articulable residue of a failure, not the judgment that forms in the person who lived it. The reader of the postmortem learns 'what' went wrong. The one who was in the situation learns to 'feel' the wrongness coming next time. The first is information and it decays, as you say. The second is judgment, and it's the part that can't be recorded.
Which may be why the lessons go unlearned despite everyone's diligence. We keep trying to transfer the wound by transferring the document.
Bad Judgment
(no manual available) essay of Selective Amnesia dives deep into the Judgement/Experience—a subject most relevant in our Technology Era where Machines are projected to decide,Judge based on their text book knowledge.
MR.RAJESH ACHANTA true to his style,discusses history, neurologically, cognitive processes,psychology and research studies and sticks to his quoted quote—Good judgment is the result of experience. Experience is the result of bad judgment.
To delve deeper,he suggests readers to —Stay with that sentence for a moment.
Well,I for one,am staying with that sentence permanently.
I believe even a writer of a book in swimming can’t swim unless he practices,and,ditto for all things.
जाके पैर न फटे बिवाई, वह क्या जाने पीर पराई ?
———
The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Charlie Munger
I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolution’s development of the nervous-system cells that control behavior are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to man’s multiple billions of cells in his brain alone.
Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioral algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ant’s case, the behavioral algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The ant learns a little behavior from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes.
Naturally, the simple ant behavior system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve-system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone given off by a dead ant’s body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvard’s great E.O. Wilson performed one of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases.
Another type of ant demonstrates that the limited brain of ants can be misled by circumstances as well as by clever manipulation from other creatures. The brain of this ant contains a simple behavioral program that directs the ant, when walking, to follow the ant ahead. And when these ants stumble into walking in a big circle, they sometimes walk round and round until they perish.
It seems obvious, to me at least, that the human brain must often operate counterproductively just like the ant’s, from unavoidable oversimplicity in its mental process, albeit usually in trying to solve problems more difficult than those faced by ants that don’t have to design airplanes.
The perception system of man clearly demonstrates just such an unfortunate outcome. Man is easily fooled, either by the cleverly thought out manipulation of man, by circumstances occurring by accident, or by very effective manipulation practices that man has stumbled into during “practice evolution” and kept in place because they work so well. One such outcome is caused by a quantum effect in human perception. If stimulus is kept below a certain level, it does not get through. And, for this reason, a magician was able to make the Statue of Liberty disappear after a certain amount of magician lingo expressed in the dark.
With this introductory instruction from ants, magicians, and the grand general principle of social psychology, I will next simply number and list psychology-based tendencies that, while generally useful, often mislead. (Discussion of errors from each tendency will come later, together with description of some antidotes to errors, followed by some general discussion,omitted).Here are the tendencies:
Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency
Liking/Loving Tendency
Disliking/Hating Tendency
Doubt-Avoidance Tendency
Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency
Curiosity Tendency
Kantian Fairness Tendency
Envy/Jealously Tendency
Reciprocation Tendency
Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency
Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial
Excessive Self-Regard Tendency
Overoptimism Tendency
Deprival-Superreaction Tendency
Social-Proof Tendency
Contrast-Misreaction Tendency
Stress-Influence Tendency
Availability-Misweighing Tendency
Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency
Drug-Misinfluence Tendency
Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency
Authority-Misinfluence Tendency
Twaddle Tendency
Reason-Respecting Tendency
Lollapalooza Tendency—The Tendency to Get Extreme Consequences from Confluences of Psychology Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome
———
The Moral Machine is a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving cars. We generate moral dilemmas, where a driverless car must choose the lesser of two evils, such as killing two passengers or five pedestrians. As an outside observer, people judge which outcome they think is more acceptable. They can then see how their responses compare with other people. If they are feeling creative, people can also design their own scenarios, for others to view, share, and discuss.
(Visit the Moral Machine.)
—————
Wharton researchers have conducted extensive studies on artificial intelligence bias, focusing on generative AI, hiring algorithms, and human decision-making. Key findings show that AI often replicates historical discrimination, that humans struggle to fairly audit these models, and that the biggest risk is not just the bias itself, but blind human trust in it.
Thank You. That couplet is the entire post in one line: जाके पैर न फटे बिवाई, वह क्या जाने पीर पराई. Cracked feet as the price of understanding another's pain. Polanyi spent years reaching for what those few syllables already hold: the knowing that arrives only through the walking.
The E O Wilson experiment in Munger's piece lands exactly where Alan Kay's frog landed last Saturday—the one you pointed me to. The frog starves among paralysed flies and gorges on thrown cardboard, its hardware seeing only small moving shapes and taking that for the whole world. Wilson's ant drags a living, kicking nestmate from the hive because the smell says corpse. Same failure, two species: a simple program run by rote where it was never meant to apply.
But here the paths divide. The ant does it again the next time, and the time after—the program cannot 'feel' its own failure, so nothing changes. What the ant lacks is not intelligence; it is the capacity to be wrong, register the cost, and reorient. That is judgment—the one thing repetition alone can never become, and the one thing a human builds from exactly these failures. Thanks again.