I've seen this way to express this concept by Amanda Askell, a PhD in... Philosophy, which, although it's a real thing, sounds kind of redundant since PhD translates to "Doctor in Philosophy". 🤔
She works as an AI researcher for Anthropic on Claude's character and personality, and I saw her in an interview by Lex Fridman talking mostly about Claude, Anthropic's generative AI model.
This topic was marginal in the discussion, but it inspired my post for today.
I've seen this concept expressed in different ways before. From Thomas Edison's famous quote after he finally invented the incandescent light bulbs, which lasted an impressive (at the time) 14.5 hours...
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
to more recent interpretations as "Failing Forward" in personal development (John C. Maxwell), most interpretations I've seen revolve around the need to fail in order to achieve success.
Sometimes AIs are surprising... This is an image for "complacency". A "man sitting on a rock in the middle of a serene lake" seems quite fitting for someone who doesn't want to disturb the status quo.
What Amanda Askell did was to flip this. Practically, by negating the whole sentence "failing is a way to succeed", you get "not failing is a way to fail".
This is equally powerful, if not more. Because no one wants to fail in what they are doing. But at the same time, enough people don't want to take chances. They are good with the situation they are in, they don't thrive to improve anything. In many cases this is because they are afraid of losing what they already have.
But we humans are explorers by nature. The hardships of life made some of us more cautious. And to explore means to take chances, which may succeed or fail.
I believe "not failing as a way to fail" is seen as complacency, as a cap we hit and don't want to push through. That's why it ends in failure. Because you don't thrive to be the best version of yourself.
I thought it was an interesting shift of the concept. What do you think?