OSD 208: This guy can hit or miss. You can’t miss once.
OSD 208: This guy can hit or miss. You can’t miss once.
On the tradeoffs of failure-avoidance.
The first OSD movie watch party was this past Friday, and naturally we watched Heat. (Side note: click here to become a paid member and get an invite to future watch parties.)
Ahead of the climatic bank heist, Nate (Jon Voight) tries to talk Neil (Robert De Niro) out of going through with the job (clip here). Nate has discovered that Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is onto Neil’s crew, and that makes the heist too risky:
Nate: Divorced twice, current wife Justine. He’s why the extra heat. The vice-sergeant says Hanna likes you. Thinks you’re some kind of star. You do this sharp, you do that sharp. “Look how sharp this guy is to figure that.”
Neil: chuckles
Nate: Funny as a heart attack, man. Three marriages. What the fuck you think that means, he likes staying home? Means the man is one of those guys, out there, prowling around all night, dedicated. With this guy and this much heat, you should pass.
Neil: It’s worth the stretch.
Nate: This guy can hit or miss. You can’t miss once. You sure?
Neil: I am sure.
In the watch party chat, WaGuns45 immediately wrote, “‘This guy can hit or miss - you can't miss once’ - OSD material there”. Well, here we go.
You can break uncertain situations down into three classes:
Failure is deadly.
Failure is manageable.
Failure is necessary.
1. Failure is deadly
This is the situation Neil is in. It’s also a common one in matters of personal safety. In “OSD 192: Safety at scale”, we talked about it in the context of gun safety:
Think about a dry fire procedure. Or a holstering procedure. Or a drawstroke. It’ll work safely ten out of ten times. And probably a hundred out of a hundred. Maybe a thousand out of a thousand. But those are human-scale numbers. Our monkey brains deal in those. We don’t deal in millions, but gun safety does. Is your holstering procedure reliable enough to work safely one million out of one million times? Not a single violation in all those reps?
On average, two million flights need to take off before there’s a single death. And the vast majority of those are in “general aviation”, i.e. every rando with a Cessna. The major U.S. carriers had zero fatalities in 2020, on 4,519,110 departures. In fact since 2002, the major carriers have averaged one fatal accident per 18 million departures. Since 2010 they have had a total of two deaths. (Data here.)
Gun rights are winning. We’re partway through making tens of millions of new gun owners. That means we need to think at scale.
Generally, you’re in this class of situation when a single failure will end your game. That means it generally applies to anyone playing a high-stakes game of defense. Attackers by definition get to choose the time and place of engagement, and they also choose when (or whether) to disengage. Defenders don’t have that option, so they have to either win the engagement or turn the tables and put the attacker on defense. That’s a “can’t miss once” situation.
Guidance for this class of situations: avoid whenever possible. For the eventuality that avoidance won’t always work, optimize training for guaranteeing a positive outcome. (As opposed to optimizing for creativity, speed, etc.) If you ever need to draw your carry gun, it will be in one of these class 1 situations. So training should center on that.
2. Failure is manageable
This is where day-to-day improvement lives. Here, failure isn’t disastrous but it is to be avoided, provided that the costs of avoidance are reasonable. This is what you’re doing when you buy a new piece of gear or work on a new drill at the range. Try stuff out, adapt when you fail, and move on.
This is also what you’re doing when you train to failure on the range or at the gym. Inducing small, manageable failures to find and increase your limits.
Guidance for this class: move deliberately and manage costs thoughtfully.
3. Failure is necessary
In Amazon’s 2015 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos wrote about failure in domains with bounded downside and unbounded upside:
Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution. When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1000 runs.
In a discovery process, if you’re not failing then you’re not being ambitious enough. Failure isn’t desirable, but it is necessary if you’re going to do anything that’s actually innovative. This is where good new products come from.
A relevant excerpt from “OSD 185: Hypebeasts as honeybees”:
The tough thing about getting hyped about some fundamentally new product is that it always looks silly and fringe at first. The difference between good innovations and ones that fizzle is that the good ones eventually seem obviously good. Often they become so obviously good that people forget it was ever non-obvious. (No opinion here about the Hydra, and no clue if it’s any good. Just using it as a jumping-off point.) The point is that “is this just hype or is this real?” is a question you can only answer in retrospect. In the moment, “this looks weird” is actually not a great predictor of whether the product is actually any good.
If you respond, “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” to every new product, the seductive thing about that is that you’ll be right most of the time. Because most products fail. But that attitude’s failure mode is that it will miss the products that are actually good.
Squint at that and it turns out that the people who buy new gun stuff like it’s a limited-edition Air Jordan release are performing a valuable public service — they’re exploring every bit of new gear instantly, often at absurd expense to themselves. If something’s good, these scouts quickly spread the word like a bee telling everyone where the good flowers are.
Guidance for this class: move fast and break things.
This week’s links
Michael Mann’s commentary on the Heat bank shootout
Details, details.
Our own Chuck Rossi on the latest Primary & Secondary podcast
Good conversation. Other guests on this episode were Caleb Giddings and Sarah Hauptman.
Oregon Supreme Court upholds the stay on enforcement of Ballot Measure 114
More in “OSD 195: Majority rules”.
Merch
Top-quality hats, t-shirts, and patches.
OSD office hours
If you’re a new gun owner, thinking about becoming one, or know someone who is, come to OSD office hours. It’s a free 30-minute video call with an OSD team member to ask any and all your questions.