Postmortems Help Address Causes of Errors

[Dface]

@Elliot

The bias can cause an unlimited number of mistakes. People also have other underlying problems, besides biases, such as conceptual misconceptions, that can cause many mistakes over time.

I’m not sure if I found underlying biases yet or conceptual misconceptions while doing postmortems. Like, it’s hard to think of examples of me finding those. So I think that’s a sign maybe to work on finding them. They sound important

@Elliot

A more specific example would be having a political bias, then reading news stories from your side and believing them even when they’re incorrect. Both main US political sides have information sources that put out many incorrect pieces of information.

I got an example where I would be scrolling twitter a lot and I would believe almost anything as a news source. I would believe stuff that appeared unfortunate like a death or someone coming down with a disease. I think an example is of Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. I thought he was dead for the longest time a few months ago cuz of a few posts i read. My conclusion rn tho is i have no idea what is happening with him. I think i was making an error while reading twitter. I wish I could label what kind but I think im more wary of reading stories and automatically accepting them. I think the problem could still happen since I don’t think I found the kind of error i made and really the effective change to prevent it. Now I think if I got info from twitter, then I should be wary of its credibility.

@Elliot

Are you correcting your errors since, when someone links you to a persuasive fact check, you change your mind about that specific case? Or is it important to look into the underlying issue?

It’s hard to think of individual errors vs. underlying ones. Like, it’s hard to be confident that something is an underlying error or an individual error. I think that’s a problem and something to postmortem about.

@Elliot

Most important error patterns are much more subtle than this, so data points about them have higher value. When you can’t quickly guess what kind of underlying cause is behind an error, it has a better potential to be caused by something important that isn’t so well known.

I have found that I can’t quickly guess sometimes the underlying causes of some errors. I have “tourette syndrome”(I honestly think of it it like an addiction), and it’s hard to know why I do it. I think it’s a conflict resolution thing but I still I want to know why it happens. Like, why I want to do certain kind of movements/twitches for it. I don’t know if that stuff is related to postmortems. Sounds like it is. I think not knowing why I want to do something can be an error. Maybe the error is not categorizing automatizations like by what goals they accomplish. Idk about all this btw

@Elliot

It’s also important to have high standards. People often do a superficial postmortem investigation and then come up with some kind of explanation of the error, and then want to move on. Their explanation is usually either a well known idea or else a denial that there’s anything important going on – a claim that they made a random error that isn’t due to some meaningful pattern.

What I first thought is that when I try to do post mortems, I don’t think I come up with anything that’s really conclusive. Like, I don’t think oh ok this is the kind of underlying error im making and that im confident about it. I think I lose track of the kinds of errors I make because of all this.

I want to keep an eye out more on underlying erros cuz they sound important.

@Elliot

Not fixing your errors in a serious way means you keep making them, which takes up a lot of time and energy, in addition to causing failures at goals you have.

Yes, I feel this. There’s so many errors I think I make while learning something it’s draining to do.

@Elliot

If you deal with criticism by wanting to close the issue and move on fast – if you aren’t comfortable knowing about a mistake you made and not yet considering it fixed – then you have some hostility to criticism which is getting in the way of making progress.

I think I do sense some hostility from me when looking for mistakes and fixing them. Like I think my main thing is how long it takes and how much effort it is to address errors let alone underlying ones. It seems like a lot of work to do and that I might not get anywhere anyways. I think there’s some problems/errors/conflicts going on there.