Choose To Lose
I must not teach you to fight if you do not understand how to lose.
— Professor Quirinus Quirrell, from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Failure is a good thing.
Double your rate of failure.
I have not failed, but found 1000 ways that won’t work.
It is a frequent refrain that, as we are trying to succeed, failures will happen and we must learn to recognize this as part of the process. But choosing to fail deliberately is also a legal move that we don’t hear about that much. Below, we will explore some examples where choosing to fail is not the most terrible idea.
1. Say the wrong answer.
You’re in Physics class and the teacher asked some question. Maybe it was, “What is Newton’s First Law of Motion?” This is a good opportunity to Say The Wrong Answer. I don’t mean, you might know the answer but are feeling a bit unsure and should be brave and say it anyway. I mean, you should think of an answer that you know for sure is wrong, and say it out loud. Like,
“The planets orbit the Sun.”
“Everything eventually stops moving.”
“Objects repel each other when they get too close.”
Be careful, it is easy to “accidentally” come up with a humblebrag wrong answer, e.g. you accidentally say Newton’s Second Law to show off you’ve read the textbook, or you say something that is particularly funny so people think you are joking instead of thinking that you might be stupid. Don’t do that. The point is that your answer should make you feel embarassed, and you must pay attention to how the embarassment feels in your body.
When you become well acquainted with this feeling, it will become less and less of something to be afraid of.
2. Ask wrong questions.
Similar to #1. It’s math class now. Mr. Humbledore reads aloud:
A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that is not a product of two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number.
He asks the class: “Are there any questions?”
This is a good opportunity to Ask The Wrong Questions!
They say there are no stupid questions. They are wrong, otherwise there would be no need for this quote to have been said.
Exercise: Come up with 3 wrong questions.
Here’s several I came up with:
- Other than prime numbers, composite numbers, and 1, what other types of numbers are there?
- Is pi a prime number?
- If there’s prime numbers for multiplication, are there any for addition, subtraction, and division?
- Can a number change from prime to composite?
- Can a shape like a circle be prime or composite too?
- Is a prime number better than other numbers?
(As it happens, although these questions all have some amount of stupid in them, they are not that bad, as they prod at the boundary of what “prime” and “number” and “be” mean.)
Compared to Saying The Wrong Answer, you may find that Asking The Wrong Question often helps someone (possibly not you) learn something anyway, because all questions elucidate a way someone’s model might be wrong - either by filling in a piece of the model that was missing (from the answer to the question), or by correcting the incorrect part of the model that made an incoherent question seem coherent.
One day, you will have a Real Question that unfortunately sounds stupid. By practicing Asking the Wrong Question, you will have the courage to ask it anyway.
3. Fail an exam.
It’s math class again, and there’s a quiz on Friday. It’s about brute forcing geometry problems with coordinate methods. It so happens that this is the one thing you know best. This is a good opportunity to Fail An Exam.
As a obvious warning:
The first rule of choosing to lose is that you must survive your failure, figuratively and for real. Do not fail if you cannot afford to. There are some exams (figurative and literal) where failure will set you back an indefinite amount of years.
Generally this is self explanatory, but there are some things to keep in mind.
Don’t just turn in a blank exam, or write low effort answers. These give plausible deniability for your lack of ability. The teacher will think “he’s having a bad day” and your parents will think “he’s doing this on purpose for some reason”. You must fail for real. Some of your answers must be correct. Some of them must show you tried very hard but still got the wrong answer because you seem to have misunderstood something. Some, you leave blank because you ran out of time. People must believe you actually don’t know how to do the problems. Your teacher must give you the test back with red ink and a restrained but disappointed look. Your parents must log onto the web portal, and see you got a 82.0% (assuming your usual score was something like 95-100%), and give you a stern talking to.
There is a particular kind of person who actually feels horrified at the concept of getting a bad score on an exam (for some definition of bad score). They might go through their lives spending disproportionate amounts of time preparing for exams they don’t care about. They might actually be driven mad and break down on the day they actually do get a bad score. If you are this kind of person, exposure to failure early on in low stakes exams would not be a terrible idea. You will experience failure, and find that you are still alive and well.
4. Lose a possession.
I’m very afraid of losing things. But I still haven’t backed up my computer in 3 months because apparently my brain does not attribute enough importance to this task to pick up the hard drive from across my room, plug it in, and copy some files over.
This is a good opportunity to Lose A Possession. I could go find a photo I like on my computer, holding a precious memory, and delete it. “Are you sure you want to delete 2009_my_favorite_picture_from_family_trip_to_nyc.jpg?” Yes, delete.
Now I have taught my brain a lesson. I have a made the low probability risk of losing my files real and visceral. By exposing myself to a small amount of what I was afraid of but failed to act to prevent, I have taught my brain to act. (Or, maybe I would’ve found out, I don’t actually care about these photos that much, and most important digital information I have is online somewhere already and it really isn’t such a big deal.)
5. Get bullied.
I learned how to lose in a dojo in Asia, which, as any Muggle knows, is where all the good martial artists live. […] During one of my first fights, after I had been beaten in a particularly humiliating fashion, I lost control and attacked my sparring partner. The Master, surprisingly, did not expel me on the spot. But he told me that there was a flaw in my temperament. He explained it to me, and I knew that he was right. And then he said that I would learn how to lose.
Upon his strict orders, all of the students of the dojo lined up. One by one, they approached me. I was not to defend myself. I was only to beg for mercy. One by one, they slapped me, or punched me, and pushed me to the ground. Some of them spat on me. They called me awful names in their language. And to each one, I had to say, ‘I lose!’ and similar such things, such as ‘I beg you to stop!’ and ‘I admit you’re better than me!’
— Professor Quirinus Quirrell. Chapter 19 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
Suppose you have trouble controlling your emotions when being humiliated, disrespected, or in an otherwise adversarial situation. You have no plans this coming Saturday. This is a good opportunity to Get Bullied. Invite some of your friends over (or your rivals and enemies). Put out a yoga mat and some pillows on the floor. To the degree that you are comfortable with (or the upper bound of discomfort which you would be willing to bear), instruct your friends to mock, belittle, insult, slap, and push you. And you will say to each one in turn: “You are better than me” and “I beg you to stop”. Then, you can switch places with someone so everyone gets to be bullied.
If you don’t want to get bullied by real people, you can always imagine it happening in your head.
Exercise: Gettingbullied Meditation
- Imagine two people who you are afraid of or dislike.
- Imagine they are saying mean things to you. Actually come up with the mean things they are saying and imagine them saying it. Imagine they are pushing you over.
- Repeat the phrases:
“You are better than me.”
“I beg you to stop.”
“I lose.”
[Disclaimer: If you think this might cause mental damage to yourself, don’t do it.]
There is proper falling form when you fall, which is much safer than just falling. Perhaps from this you will learn proper being-bullied form, for when you are really bullied.
6. Sink the boats.
项羽乃悉引兵渡河，皆沉船，破釜甑，烧庐舍，持三日粮，以示士卒必死，无一还心。
— 史记Xiang Yu brought his soldiers across the river, sunk all the boats, broke all the cauldrons and cooking pots, burned the huts, and kept only three days of food. By doing so, he demonstrated to his soldiers that [absent victory] they would die, and there was no hope for return.
— Records of the Grand Historian
Increase the consequences of losing, and you can summon superhuman determination. The key is that this operation must be very hard to reverse.
You want to apply to college or graduate school but can’t be bothered to write the personal essays. At this rate, your essays are either going to be non-existent or written by gpt-4o-mini. This is a good opportunity to Sink The Boats. You give a trusted friend $1000 and tell them: If I don’t finish writing these essays within a month, don’t give me my money back.
(Related: Beeminder is basically this as a service. I have a friend who uses beeminder as the primitive upon which his life is built. He is one of the most prolific people I know. Unfortunately, I tried it for a month and lost 60 bucks because I could not coerce myself to check Beeminder every day.)
You want to wake up early at 6am so that you can be a healthy person, but when you wake up at 6am usually you had an interesting dream and want to find out what happens next or remember what happend at all so you go back to sleep. To Sink The Boats, you set a daily scheduled email at 6:30am that is embarassing and gets sent to your crush.
You want to finally finish writing your paper on “Extracting Coherent Egregores from Llama 3.1 405b”. By finish you mean start. You sign up to give a talk about your paper in 8 months at a prestigious conference.
You want to be better to your family. You tessellate your walls with images of them, so that when you neglect them, you are surrounded by the visual screams of your failure.
You want to solve human aging in your lifetime. You decide not to sign up for cryonics.
7. Practice wrong notes on the piano.
You have a recital coming up and you are practicing Chopin Waltz Op. 64 No. 2. There’s the fast part that goes like this that occasionally you mess up on so you keep practicing that part. You notice your rate of failure goes down from 10% to 5% but it is unlikely to go to 0%.
This is a good opportunity to Practice Wrong Notes. Normally when you make a mistake what happens? Sometimes you might just STOP and start from an earlier part (maybe the very beginning). This would be Very Bad during an actual recital (unless you are Choosing to Lose in that manner). Ideally, you would just act natural and keep playing the notes after that.
What if you did this:
- Pick a part of the song you mess up on.
- Figure out some wrong note sequences you might play instead.
- Practice playing the song with those wrong note combinations and not panicking and starting over when it happens.
This is similar to learning proper falling form. You are learning to fail gracefully during a song.
This can be applied to any performative art.
8. Get rejected.
Everyday for 100 days, a dude named Jia Jiang went around asking people for unconventional things such as “donuts in the shape of the olympic logo” or “can I take a selfie with a soccer ball in your backyard”. The goal was to get rejected in order to strengthen his mental fortitude. He called this practice Rejection Therapy and posted all his rejections on Youtube.
I remember reading this book 10 years ago and thinking this is great idea and I proceeded to never do it. I think this is great if you can do it. However, it is an incredibly daunting thing to someone who is afraid of rejection or are socially anxious. It is also potentially less doable nowadays that there are a lot of people going around asking people stupid things for social media content, and you might potentially be lumped into that group of people.
A lightweight alterantive to 100 Day Rejection Therapy is seeking micro-rejections. Think of incredibly small and unimportant things you can ask people, and become comfortable asking those questions.
You are at a grocery store. There are people around you. This is a great opportunity to Get Micro-Rejected.
- Do you know where the bathroom is?
- I am colorblind. What color is this article of clothing?
- Excuse me, where did you find <point at an item in their cart>?
- [Pretend you mistake a customer for an employee.] Would you know where the LEGO Creator 3 in 1 Deep Sea Creatures Shark Toy Set 31088 is?
- [Pretend you mistake a customer for your friend.] Hey Bob Roberts long time no see!
- Excuse me, do you know what time it is? My phone died.
- Excuse me, do you know what vegetables go well with cucumbers?
- [See someone who picks up an apple.] Hey, do you know how to tell which apples are good?
- [Look at person wearing a sports shirt.] Hey, did you catch the football game yesterday? [Bonus points for naming the wrong sport.]
For some readers these questions might not sound difficult at all, but there is a particular kind of person for which the thought of asking any of these to a stranger is harrowing. However, they are questions of low consequence, and good for practicing both speaking to strangers and receiving negatory responses.
Once you are comfortable with these, you can build up to larger rejections. For example, you might
- Ask your teacher for a particularly long extension for an assignment
- Ask your friend to pretend to be your sibling when you go to meet some other person
- Ask your boss for a raise
- Ask your boss to decrease your salary in exchange for dropping an obligation you hate
- Ask the waiter if they can put some ice cream in the soup dumplings
Exercise: Micro-Rejections
Come up with 3 ways to get micro-rejected that you can do within the next 12 hours.
End
Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible.
— Go Proverb
Losing is fun.
— Dwarf Fortress proverb
Greet the heat of entropy, maximum surprise
Climb up the gradient ascent, and brave the error’s rise
— Embedded Agency