Elysium

The Benefit of Loss

Posted by snow under Theory

Our society puts such an emphasis on winning that ‘losing’ becomes something disgraceful, to the point that we are no longer learning from our mistakes. If you beat up a 2nd grader, you may feel good for a couple minutes (well, then again, maybe not), but only after getting your butt kicked by a secret assassin will you become stronger. Why?

Winning boosts one’s confidence, but not proportionately, one’s skill. Winning doesn’t tell you why you won or the weaknesses in the strategy you are using. It doesn’t tell you anything about all the ‘secret sauce’ others have out there in the world, it doesn’t give you anything than a sense that you are superior to the problem, person, or thing in question. Although confidence goes a long way, it can’t replace knowledge. Getting an A on your economics test doesn’t prepare you at all for a subprime meltdown, or even something as basic as valuing a company with skewed financials, or even what kind of bank account to put your earnings from your summer job in for a good return. Yet, it gives us a false sense of understanding the world proper.

This is my biggest gripe about the modern education system. It emphasizes so much on performance and benchmarking that it doesn’t teach students the proper way of learning. They are measured by how well they can memorize a set of data and how well they can regurgitate it into a particular problem. Learning in real life consists of seeing where one has made a mistake, having the courage to admit that one has made it, understanding why it happened and prevent it from happening again. The response to failure that the modern education system promotes is: you are inferior to everyone else n00b. People hide from their mistakes for shame, or subconsciously block them out when they should be embracing them as a chance to learn and become stronger.