yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Groups Never Admit Failure


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in a mythology of "we were oppressed" than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don't like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong; a group will never admit, "we made a mistake," because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart.

So, I'm hard pressed in history to find examples of large groups where they've said, "we thought A, but the answer is actually B." Usually, what happens in that case is a schism, where you go from the Catholic Church to Protestant and so on. There's a divergence and usually a lot of infighting. This happens in crypto land too, where the coins fork. Bitcoin doesn't suddenly say, "we should have had smart contracts," or ETH doesn't suddenly say, "we should have been immutable."

I was on the board of a foundation that was charged with giving out money for a cause, and I found it very disillusioning because what I learned was that no matter what the foundation did, they would declare victory. They would give money for a certain thing; they would support a certain project, and every project was victorious. Every project was a success. There was a lot of back slapping, a lot of high-sounding mission statements and vision statements, a lot of congratulations, a lot of nice dinners, but nothing ever got done.

What I realized was because there is no objective feedback, because there is no loss, it's all social profit. They couldn't fail, and because they couldn't fail, they misdirected resources all day long. Eventually, of course, such groups run on money. If you want to change the world to a better place, the best way to do it is as a for-profit because for-profits have to take feedback from reality.

Ironically, for-profit entities are more sustainable than non-profit entities. They're self-sustainable. You're not out there with a begging bowl all the time, and of course, you lose the beautiful non-profit status; you have to pay your taxes. You can also get corrupted by being purely for-profit. But I would argue that the best businesses are the ones that, long-term, are both for-profit, sustainable, and ethical.

So you can attract the best people, you can sustain it because it's a mission. It's not just about the money because it's diminishing returns to making money. There's diminishing marginal utility and money in your life. So I learned that if you want to change the world, you're probably better off trying to do it with a for-profit.

More Articles

View All
Factoring polynomials using complex numbers | Khan Academy
We’re told that Ahmat tried to write ( x^4 + 5x^2 + 4 ) as a product of linear factors. This is his work, and then they tell us all the steps that he did, and then they say in what step did Ahmad make his first mistake. So pause this video and see if you …
Snowmobile Inspection | Life Below Zero
Go have a look at the undercarriage. I look for dead shocks, the Fela dead shocks. I want to feel some pressure and some compression. These are feeling good. One of our wear parts on a snow machine is a belt. You can burn them up, bust them, blow them; al…
Proof: perpendicular radius bisects chord
So we have this circle called circle O based on the point at its center, and we have the segment OD, and we’re told that segment OD is a radius of circle O. Fair enough! We’re also told that segment OD is perpendicular to this chord, to chord AC, or to se…
The Most Important Personality Trait You Need to Build
Pay attention! Okay, because this fact will blow your mind. Did you know that 99.9% of all the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct? So, how about the 0.01% that survived? Well, a key factor that determined their survival was their abilit…
Big takeaways from the Civil War
We’ve been discussing the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 until 1865. It was the deadliest conflict in all of American history, in which about 620,000 Americans lost their lives. We briefly went over the very end of the war, as Grant caught up …
Divergence formula, part 1
Hello everyone. So, now that we have an intuition for what divergence is trying to represent, let’s start actually drilling in on a formula. The first thing I want to do is just limit our perspective to functions that only have an x component, or rather w…