On Tilt
Willful Wednesday; SFE Pt. 3
Willful Wednesday: Safe Failure Environment Part 3
Hi there, welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Willful Wednesday. If you’re new to the blog, that means that on Wednesdays we talk about sticking through the hard parts, gritting one’s teeth, and keepin’ on truckin’.
Today also marks the third (ish) entry in my series on “Safe Failure Environments.” If you’re curious, you can read the others here, though they are in no way prerequisites for this article:
SFE Pt. 1: Five reasons to stop asking successful people how they became successful.
SFE Pt. 2: Face-planting and laughing about it: why we need to encourage failure in learning.
SFE Pt. 2.5: Not Just Bliss: the Case for Ignorance
Today we’re going to talk about a topic I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while now: Tilt.
There is a mouth that is constantly screaming
There is a mouth that is constantly screaming. In your ear, at your throat, behind you in line.
There is a mouth that is constantly screaming. In your coffee, on your feed, at the head of your department.
There is a mouth that is constantly screaming. In your head, under your thoughts, at the margins what you perceive.
I have a mouth that is constantly screaming, and it’s giving me a hangover.
Seeking Failure
I initially started the project of writing and posting once a day, every day to embrace my philosophy of “safe failure.” As others in Silicon Valley might put it, “fail fast, fail often,” though that strategy tends towards iteration in product, rather than leveraged learning.
The 85% rule for learning says that you should have about 85% accuracy, or 15.87% error rate. So I expect around 1.5 out of every 10 of my posts to be duds. If I notice that I haven’t written about a topic outside my comfort zone in over a week, I know it’s time to push the boundaries.
Often times, it fails and people say mean things to me online (should I decide to post it). While that feels bad, feeling bad for a few hours is far from the worst outcome that could result from sharing work publicly. Every once in a while, that 10th post blows up. There’s randomness involved, but the rate at which the posts where I’m pushing myself do well is good feedback for where I’m at in my writing journey.
For me, failure is evidence of the confidence required to experiment. The problem with failure, especially in social settings, is that it can be embarrassing and demoralizing. The idea of “safe failure” is to create a learning environment where the dysphoria of failure is reduced to an absolute minimum. That way, my willingness to pick up and try again isn’t impacted even when my ego is bruised.
Audience Building
To mark success or failure for creative work you must expose it to people other than the author and gauge their response. If you’re serious about writing, this necessitates audience building.
I love writing. I hate audience building. I value feedback, discussion, and reflection on my ideas immensely as gateways to improvement. Those gateways are guarded by community. For upstarts like myself, getting feedback on original content is difficult due to the paradoxical hate of self promotion, especially on Reddit.1
Community is valuable for the express reason that it is gatekept. In developer relations it’s not at all uncommon for companies to want to “buy a seat at the table.” Publishers and editors want you to come with a pre-packaged audience. It’s similar to the prestigious universities whose value proposition is their exclusivity.
Funny enough, before I started at Slack I was actually refused a job at Twilio for the express reason of not having enough clout. I believe they phrased it kindly as wanting “someone who had a more established ‘presence’ in the communities [they] want to engage with.”
If you want to publish a book, you need followers, If you want to push an idea, you need advocates, if you want to get a job, you need references. Though necessary for success, these are all intermediaries. They are instrumental goals.
Instrumental Goals
In an economy where the underlying engine is attention, it’s far from curious that attention would be guarded like any other vital resource. To have someone give you their eyes, their mind, to open their thoughts to yours— that’s tantamount to legal tender in a world of clickbait and ad traffic.
This is why it’s easy to get caught in the audience building trap. It’s an instrumental goal; action for the sake of action. This gets into value theory, and more specifically the difference between intrinsic and instrumental value:
In moral philosophy, instrumental and intrinsic value are the distinction between what is a means to an end and what is as an end in itself.
You don’t acquire money because you intend to use it as fuel to heat your house, you acquire money to exchange it later for wood. You don’t need a reason to acquire money beyond knowing that you may need or want anything in the future. So too with all intermediate resources (attention included) — they are means to an end.
This stands in contrast with intrinsic goals, which are their own reward. To me, writing every day is an intrinsic goal because I derive pleasure from the writing itself. Audience building is an instrumental goal because it lacks the direct satisfaction I get from putting words to page but is necessary if I want to continue to improve my writing.
The problem with instrumental action is that it removes you from true purpose. When you’re accomplishing something solely as an intermediary, you don’t have the drive of doing it for the sake of doing it. Instrumental goals obscure purpose; it can be easy to forget what your intrinsic motivation ever was when you’re one step removed. This is how one ends up “on tilt.”
Tilt
“Tilt” got its start in poker, and quickly made its way into other gaming communities. I picked it up while play Magic: the Gathering (which has a large overlap with the poker community), but it’s very common to hear during Twitch esports broadcasts, often in reference to angry players becoming overly aggressive. Here’s the part of the wikipedia definition relevant to what I want to talk about today:
term for a state of mental or emotional confusion or frustration in which a player adopts a less than optimal strategy.
The community can’t seem to decide whether or not tilt originated from pinball or Cervantes, which brings me a lot of joy. As I mentioned earlier, there are strong connotations with anger- we’re going to forget about those for today’s conversation.
Often times tilt happens in a negative feedback cycle: a player becomes emotionally frustrated and makes poor decisions, causing failure and enforcing the frustration, leading to more bad decisions, leading to more failures. When you go on a big enough losing streak you inevitably chalk the failure up to tilt: you believe your failure has become self-enforcing.
Tilt is like a cancer, tainting everything it touches. It makes you forget why you were even doing an activity in the first place. When you’re on tilt, you stop playing for fun or for strategy or for anything but reckless pursuit of instrumental goals like kill count or score.
To me, tilt represents a consequence of an unsafe failure environment, one in which each successive failure compounds to impact accuracy- pushing you way outside of the optimal 15% error/ 85% accuracy window we discussed earlier.
I think tilt is useful terminology that can be applied to great effect outside of gaming. It can be easy to go on tilt when engaging with a hostile audience. I have a friend who likes to say that people who write hateful messages are trying to hack away at your “sanity HP.” This is trolls to a capital T- being rude to attempt to put others on tilt.
The Screaming
Yesterday, I wrote one of my “attempt failure” articles. I shared it, and quickly realized it had landed squarely in the “fail” category as a flood of vitriol filled my inbox and the post was downvoted into oblivion. Not the first time it’s happened. However, this failure felt less safe than previous ones, as I received some really aggressive private messages from angry readers.
Being on tilt is like having someone screaming in your ear while you’re doing a task. The harder you try the louder they scream. You begin to make decisions defensively with the hope that they might go away, but each of those decisions places you further from your central, intrinsic goal. You’re eventually left doing something you don’t want to do while being screamed at, and wondering why you’re even here in the first place.
On tilt, you begin to look for failure in every shadow, behind every corner. It warps your perception: you start to see what are objectively safe failure environments as unsafe. As you become increasingly frustrated and less willing to experiment, you learn less, your enjoyment of the activity decreases, and you begin to resent the whole situation.
No amount of effort can correct what is at a base an attitudinal problem born of strong emotion and aversion to failure. Tilt is a clenched, seizing muscle, a raw scream of frustration. The solution is not to clench harder or scream back, but to let go, and walk away.
Resetting
A little while back I gave some advice to someone who was frustrated with their life. They didn’t find joy in anything they did anymore, and were left doubting the value in any action. This is anhedonia, an early marker of depression wherein you stop enjoying… well, everything.
I’ve spent a lot of time anhedonic, and think it has the same macro-shape as tilt: attempting to feel joy and being frustrated when you can’t, fueling more frantic attempts and more intense frustration with their failure. My philosophy of “safe failure” is born of these struggles. Here’s what I told our anhedonic friend:
Make it your goal to try and fail. If you expect success you will pressure yourself out of it. You’re too much of an amateur at getting out of ruts to have the context to know what is and isn’t a good action to take, so you’ll be stuck in trial and error for a while. Unfortunately there’s not really any helping this since what will get you out is unique to you. Don’t even let yourself hope that an activity or action will “cure” you. There is no cure.
Now that your spirit is properly broken, recognize that you can do whatever you want. Like the journey from nihilism to existentialism: if nothing matters, then you get to decide what matters.
Find something you enjoy so much you don’t mind being bad at it. For me, it’s writing. This is NOT your lifeline. It is a fun thing you do.
Find a goal you want to work towards- a specific goal, not “getting better” for me, it’s getting a book published.
The thing that you gives you the good chemicals and the goals you want to achieve are very likely going to be misaligned. One of the first times I tried this I put so much pressure on myself to achieve the goal of making money off a video game that I was petrified of making mistakes, and couldn’t enjoy programming anymore.
That sucks, dude. Seems like you failed.
AHA! You’ve succeeded in your first goal: failure.
Now you’ve got the taste for the cycle:
Find satisfying atomic activity
Attempt to slot it into an aligned goal.
Fail.
If you still want to try again, you know you are working towards your goal simply by doing something you enjoy so much you don’t mind messing up.
You may never find your combination. That’s OK. Remember this was never about success in crawling out of the hole- this was about rebooting your brain’s cycle of interest and reward so that you can enjoy life again.
Remember: Fail often, fail fast, have fun.
Conclusion
Sometimes the we fail at the instrumental pursuits we do to support the activities that give us joy. It’s easy in those moments to get upset, and let negative emotion taint our intrinsic pursuits; those that give us joy regardless of success. This is tilt.
Whenever I feel myself tilting — instead of screaming back at unnecessarily harsh critics — I go back and read the advice above. It reminds me that I’m writing for the joy of the activity alone- not success, not attention, not interaction. It helps me calm down, tune the screaming out, and live to write another day.
The self-promo hate on reddit is paradoxical due to an equally strong drive for OC (original content). Only OC + no self promo = only established voices get to speak.
FWIW, I subscribed after coming across yesterday's "attempt failure" article, so even your failure was offset by one micro-success.