10 ms·

“The effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency” (2002)

197 points by jackpirate 9y ago

happyguy43 9y ago
Kind of at a loss here: Is the final analogy showing that relative performance on any given trial is mostly random? Or is the analogy to reinforce his point that relative performance on subsequent trials is inversely related to the type of feedback given?
- brazzy 9y ago
  Neither. It shows that when there is a gaussian distribution of performance, then exceptionally good performance will, purely based on statistics, be followed by a decrease in performance, and exceptionally bad performance will be followed by better performance. The point is that this effect will usually be much stronger than the effects of feedback, and if you naively analyse what kind of feedback works better, it will lead you to the wrong conclusion because praise is given for exceptionally good performance while scolding is given for exceptionally bad performance.
zerostar07 9y ago
i dont quite get the point, praise is better, but it is also placebo?
- brazzy 9y ago
  No, the point is that praise is better, but appears to be worse because you praise exceptional performance and people are unlikely to repeat or exceed that exceptional performance right away.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    that doesn't help deciding whether one should prefer praise or scold though , since he says both fall within placebo levels. If he is trying to say that there is more room for improvement from a bad performance, thats kind of obvious but it still means most of the time you will need to scold instead of praise.
    - brazzy 9y ago
      The evidence for praise being better is completely separate from this whole argument and comes from different sources. The article is about refuting a very misleading interpretation of common experience.
- andrewla 9y ago
  In the particular example he describes, both are placebos, because the performance is essentially random, and even in that case, it will appear that punishment is better than praise, because the administration of punishment/praise is linked to performance, which in this example, is purely random. His thesis is that praise, in real-world situations, has a positive effect, and punishment has a negative effect, but on extremely short timeframes random effects dominate, leading to the reasonable empirical belief that praise is ineffective compared to punishment.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
This is a good example of why it's important to recognize the difference between individual anecdotal experience and results gained from properly analyzing data. It's rare for people to make enormous improvements or experience enormous depredations in performance one experience to the next. It's common for natural variations due to random factors, especially when still learning, to crop up and impact performance from instance to instance. That's true whether one is shooting a basketball at a net or flying a jet aircraft. This means that quite often the experience of providing negative feedback will seem to result in improvement. But this is also true if one simply were to secretly write their negative feedback down, put it in a letter, and never show it to the student. Due to the regression to the mean effect. Students who do poorly in one round will often do better in the next, just as students who do well in one round will often do slightly worse in the next. Only over a longer period of time and collecting data from multiple students will you balance out these effects and be able to determine whether positive or negative re-enforcement work better. And the data does seem to indicate that positive re-enforcement is superior.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  The question then is, what is the optimal latency to recognise improvement or decline? Could deferring judgement help with combating this observation? Then also what magnitude of praise or negative feedback elicits best results? Essentially this could down to finding out the optimal training schedule for humans. (Like for neural nets or classifiers.) And this is similar to adversarial training. You have to consider both the trainee and the trainer (discriminator).
- piker 9y ago
  > It's rare for people to make enormous improvements or experience enormous depredations in performance one experience to the next. Not a golfer, I see.
loorinm 9y ago
I had to read it a few times . Mind Blown.
- cybertronic 9y ago
  "...because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them." I was enlightened.
computator 9y ago
When the flight instructor story and regression to the mean were discussed on HN a year ago[1], user "cortesoft" had a brilliant way to convince you: Yeah, I always make an example with coin flips to show how this is true.... lets say heads is success and tails is failure. Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :( Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707606
- cousin_it 9y ago
  This just became my favorite cautionary story about science. Thanks to you and cortesoft!
  - ataturk 9y ago
    It's more of a cautionary tale about dealing with people--I can't count the number of times I've been in some kind of work situation where the people above me believed in some absolute folklore that was detrimental to the execution of the work but they would 100% argue with anyone trying to be reasonable about what was really going on. It's like a learned helplessness, or some kind of odd comfort with the status quo. They would invent from whole cloth a whole belief system about how some software worked that was completely irrational. I include IT admin people here, not just non-techies. And the thing is, I've seen it happen more than once amongst otherwise intelligent people! So then you're in a situation where the believers begin to exert their authority over you in order to control the situation and back up their beliefs instead of trying to solve the problem, up to and including threats of termination. It's as though they might suffer emotional harm if you fix the actual underlying problems that caused the whole need to create the belief system in the first place. Those behaviors are that strong and that lizard-brained. One example: A transaction issue (actually the lack of a proper transaction) in a database was causing duplicate order numbers to occur pretty frequently each day on a large, multi-user system. Instead of getting someone competent to come in to analyze and fix the issue, the people at the company developed all these elaborate procedures for how to enter orders so that they could avoid creating duplicates in the system. They had actual written procedures and even the work schedules were affected by this order entry bug. I swear they were twirling around three times and throwing salt over one shoulder before entering a new order, but only on odd-numbered Wednesdays and Fridays. I've seen similar problems involving thread local data and badly written multithreaded code, odd caching issues on networks relating to AJAX calls from certain browsers, network setup issues, you name it. There, but for the grace of God, go I.
godelmachine 9y ago
I read it once and have no idea what point they are trying to make. Are they saying, be it reinforcement or punishment, either way its an exercise in futility?
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  On the contrary - but suggests that a lot of psychological research ignores how the person training reacts to the feedback and performance of the trainee - thus rendering the recommendations hard to follow or moot.
- dmichulke 9y ago
  Yes, it's an exercise in futility in high noise environments such as initial flight cadet performance (where mean performance only shifts over the long-term)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jgrahamc 9y ago
  That has been my experience with all of his writing. I gave up reading Thinking, Fast and Slow because he wasn't clear.
- anvandare 9y ago
  The instructor thought that "50% chance of receiving a positive signal if you send out a negative signal" was better than "50% chance of receiving a negative signal if you send out a positive signal".
  - Sharlin 9y ago
    No, the instructor thought that their feedback had a clear causal connection to the cadet’s subsequent performance (scolding makes them perform better, praise makes them worse) when actually the effect (if any) could not be separated from random noise in performance and regression to the mean.
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
This is basically the source of most "placebo" power too. Experiments that didn't take account of the fact that most illnesses get better with time.
- rocqua 9y ago
  I've heard that claim before, and it seems rather obvious when you think about it. That raises the question, has the medical research community picked up on this? I would expect a burgeoning movement to correct this in medical trials.
  - austinjp 9y ago
    If you visit scholar.google.com and search for "placebo" you'll see there's a huge amount of medical research (and speculation) dedicated to it.
  - ZeroGravitas 9y ago
    As far as I'm aware, they have, and once you take that into account placebo only has a very limited effect in controlling self-reported pain and nausea, everything else was just bad statistics. http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak-regression-to-the-mean-is-the-main-reason-ineffective-treatments-appear-to-work/ http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak... Though as that article explains, shysters, whether practicing some kind of standard woo, or working for big pharma, are keen to continue to pretend they don't understand this as long as it's paying their salary.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway5752 9y ago
  Are you sure that's true? Ask yourself why do they do double-blind experiments. I had read that depending on the illness, a non-active treatment (sugar pill) given to the control group improved their reported condition by significant and substantial margins over a population that did not get the fake treatment.
raverbashing 9y ago
But coin flips are very different from aerial maneuvers Regression to the mean notwhitstanding, you can "scold" but also correct something that was done wrong And if you got right the first time you'll have a tendency to half-ass it next times (as you already know how to do it if the need arises)
- danesparza 9y ago
  You missed the point of the last line of the story.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
danesparza 9y ago
TL;DR: It doesn't affect the outcome, so why not be nice?
- EliRivers 9y ago
  I believe this is a mis-reading. while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning The claim is that it does make a difference; being nice is better. It's easy to misread reversion to the mean as the result of praise / punishment.
  - danesparza 9y ago
    I appreciate you sharing! Here's what I paid attention to: "because there is regression to the mean" and "I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback." I think the important part of that last sentence is "without any feedback" -- this is why I assert "It doesn't affect the outcome".
Jach 9y ago
Reminds me a bit of the Red Bean experiment. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMb_UKYHvto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMb_UKYHvto -- longer vid has some lesson summaries at the end https://youtu.be/JeWTD-0BRS4?t=19m39s https://youtu.be/JeWTD-0BRS4?t=19m39s) Too often trying to use praise or punishment to change the system is the wrong thing entirely, the underlying system is flawed.
tremendulo 9y ago
I suspect what truly works is (a) the instructor knows something that you don't know, (b) you want to learn it, (c) you establish communication. Praise and blame are an inherent part of that communication. In certain circumstances, especially where (b) is less true, then praise and blame get upgraded to reward and punishment. For example if you are a child at school. We like to say that people (especially children) shouldn't be punished; they should only be rewarded. And then we deny that we are still punishing them, after all, for example by silence and withdrawal. The reality is you aren't in a relationship if you only get praise and positivity. That feels meaningless or even creepy depending on the intensity. A genuine connection will feel positive/neutral most of the time and negative occasionally, since we are knowledge-creating entities. For example, in a computer game you're learning optimally if your win:lose ratio is somewhere around 80:20. I would guess this applies to our relationships too. Neither reward nor punishment will 'work' in the absence of the other. This is why tyrants go over the top with punishment, because all blame and no praise is lack of relationship too.
- linkmotif 9y ago
  I agree with you except in interpersonal relationships people tend to confuse “punishment” with meanness or losing one’s temper. There’s never a good reason to not be patient or to lose your temper. Having room for negativity is important, but communicating negativity is much more difficult than praise on many levels.
  - tremendulo 9y ago
    I bet those who believe that anger is always and everywhere wrong are the ones who lose their temper. (They may go silent and direct the anger inwardly.) Those who use the anger will employ measured criticism and intensify their efforts.
    - linkmotif 9y ago
      Yes, how you employ/deploy your frustration or anger is everything. I still fail often. It’s probably my #1 top thing I wish to improve upon.
phasnox 9y ago
That sexy abstract.
bambax 9y ago
> I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. I thought the demonstration was going to be to set people in pairs, have one toss a coin and the other punish / scold him every time he didn't come up with tails ;-) That would help make the case that the positive effect of punishment is entirely due to chance.
baking 9y ago
An older and more effective demonstration is Deming's "Red Bead Experiment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU
flint 9y ago
There are brave pilots and old pilots, but few brave old pilots...there may be a bit more to it than a reversion to the mean.
- matell 9y ago
  or if taken to an extreme -- "he was an old, experienced kamikadze pilot".
jpalomaki 9y ago
For those finding this piece inspiring, I would recommend "The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds" by Michael Lewis [1]. The book is about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research. In my opinion a very good combination of telling the story of the main characters and also giving interesting points from their research. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Minds/dp/0393254593 https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Mi...
ggm 9y ago
Be wary of applying this to thought experiments. As yourself what if the supposed reversal was not true, and I am only being told this? The 'gets better, gets worse' quality here, is contestable because the underlying "skill" is a phantom. There is no perversity, testing if a non-existent thing is a property of the system or not: thats a strong test in science. The perversity, is people's belief in the distinction of ability over something subject to random chance.
jstrebel 9y ago
Most real-life situations are not like that. The contingency assumes that your underlying process is random with a normal distribution. In everyday life, especially when working in teams or projects, processes are not of that kind. Other people are neither random, nor is their behaviour normally-distributed. The relative effectiveness of praising and scolding is unclear in such situations. So it seems unwise to transfer this anecdote to other contexts.

197 points by jackpirate 9y ago

Kind of at a loss here: Is the final analogy showing that relative performance on any given trial is mostly random? Or is the analogy to reinforce his point that relative performance on subsequent trials is inversely related to the type of feedback given?

brazzy 9y ago
Neither. It shows that when there is a gaussian distribution of performance, then exceptionally good performance will, purely based on statistics, be followed by a decrease in performance, and exceptionally bad performance will be followed by better performance. The point is that this effect will usually be much stronger than the effects of feedback, and if you naively analyse what kind of feedback works better, it will lead you to the wrong conclusion because praise is given for exceptionally good performance while scolding is given for exceptionally bad performance.

zerostar07 9y ago

i dont quite get the point, praise is better, but it is also placebo?

brazzy 9y ago
No, the point is that praise is better, but appears to be worse because you praise exceptional performance and people are unlikely to repeat or exceed that exceptional performance right away.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  that doesn't help deciding whether one should prefer praise or scold though , since he says both fall within placebo levels. If he is trying to say that there is more room for improvement from a bad performance, thats kind of obvious but it still means most of the time you will need to scold instead of praise.
  - brazzy 9y ago
    The evidence for praise being better is completely separate from this whole argument and comes from different sources. The article is about refuting a very misleading interpretation of common experience.
andrewla 9y ago
In the particular example he describes, both are placebos, because the performance is essentially random, and even in that case, it will appear that punishment is better than praise, because the administration of punishment/praise is linked to performance, which in this example, is purely random. His thesis is that praise, in real-world situations, has a positive effect, and punishment has a negative effect, but on extremely short timeframes random effects dominate, leading to the reasonable empirical belief that praise is ineffective compared to punishment.

InclinedPlane 9y ago

This is a good example of why it's important to recognize the difference between individual anecdotal experience and results gained from properly analyzing data. It's rare for people to make enormous improvements or experience enormous depredations in performance one experience to the next. It's common for natural variations due to random factors, especially when still learning, to crop up and impact performance from instance to instance. That's true whether one is shooting a basketball at a net or flying a jet aircraft. This means that quite often the experience of providing negative feedback will seem to result in improvement. But this is also true if one simply were to secretly write their negative feedback down, put it in a letter, and never show it to the student. Due to the regression to the mean effect. Students who do poorly in one round will often do better in the next, just as students who do well in one round will often do slightly worse in the next. Only over a longer period of time and collecting data from multiple students will you balance out these effects and be able to determine whether positive or negative re-enforcement work better. And the data does seem to indicate that positive re-enforcement is superior.

AstralStorm 9y ago
The question then is, what is the optimal latency to recognise improvement or decline? Could deferring judgement help with combating this observation? Then also what magnitude of praise or negative feedback elicits best results? Essentially this could down to finding out the optimal training schedule for humans. (Like for neural nets or classifiers.) And this is similar to adversarial training. You have to consider both the trainee and the trainer (discriminator).
piker 9y ago
> It's rare for people to make enormous improvements or experience enormous depredations in performance one experience to the next. Not a golfer, I see.

loorinm 9y ago

I had to read it a few times . Mind Blown.

cybertronic 9y ago
"...because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them." I was enlightened.

computator 9y ago

When the flight instructor story and regression to the mean were discussed on HN a year ago[1], user "cortesoft" had a brilliant way to convince you: Yeah, I always make an example with coin flips to show how this is true.... lets say heads is success and tails is failure. Flip 100 coins. Take the ones that 'failed' (landed tails) and scold them. Flip them again. Half improved! Praise the ones that got heads the first time. Flip them again. Half got worse :( Clearly, scolding is more effective than praising. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707606

cousin_it 9y ago
This just became my favorite cautionary story about science. Thanks to you and cortesoft!
- ataturk 9y ago
  It's more of a cautionary tale about dealing with people--I can't count the number of times I've been in some kind of work situation where the people above me believed in some absolute folklore that was detrimental to the execution of the work but they would 100% argue with anyone trying to be reasonable about what was really going on. It's like a learned helplessness, or some kind of odd comfort with the status quo. They would invent from whole cloth a whole belief system about how some software worked that was completely irrational. I include IT admin people here, not just non-techies. And the thing is, I've seen it happen more than once amongst otherwise intelligent people! So then you're in a situation where the believers begin to exert their authority over you in order to control the situation and back up their beliefs instead of trying to solve the problem, up to and including threats of termination. It's as though they might suffer emotional harm if you fix the actual underlying problems that caused the whole need to create the belief system in the first place. Those behaviors are that strong and that lizard-brained. One example: A transaction issue (actually the lack of a proper transaction) in a database was causing duplicate order numbers to occur pretty frequently each day on a large, multi-user system. Instead of getting someone competent to come in to analyze and fix the issue, the people at the company developed all these elaborate procedures for how to enter orders so that they could avoid creating duplicates in the system. They had actual written procedures and even the work schedules were affected by this order entry bug. I swear they were twirling around three times and throwing salt over one shoulder before entering a new order, but only on odd-numbered Wednesdays and Fridays. I've seen similar problems involving thread local data and badly written multithreaded code, odd caching issues on networks relating to AJAX calls from certain browsers, network setup issues, you name it. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

godelmachine 9y ago

I read it once and have no idea what point they are trying to make. Are they saying, be it reinforcement or punishment, either way its an exercise in futility?

AstralStorm 9y ago
On the contrary - but suggests that a lot of psychological research ignores how the person training reacts to the feedback and performance of the trainee - thus rendering the recommendations hard to follow or moot.
dmichulke 9y ago
Yes, it's an exercise in futility in high noise environments such as initial flight cadet performance (where mean performance only shifts over the long-term)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jgrahamc 9y ago
That has been my experience with all of his writing. I gave up reading Thinking, Fast and Slow because he wasn't clear.
anvandare 9y ago
The instructor thought that "50% chance of receiving a positive signal if you send out a negative signal" was better than "50% chance of receiving a negative signal if you send out a positive signal".
- Sharlin 9y ago
  No, the instructor thought that their feedback had a clear causal connection to the cadet’s subsequent performance (scolding makes them perform better, praise makes them worse) when actually the effect (if any) could not be separated from random noise in performance and regression to the mean.

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

This is basically the source of most "placebo" power too. Experiments that didn't take account of the fact that most illnesses get better with time.

rocqua 9y ago
I've heard that claim before, and it seems rather obvious when you think about it. That raises the question, has the medical research community picked up on this? I would expect a burgeoning movement to correct this in medical trials.
- austinjp 9y ago
  If you visit scholar.google.com and search for "placebo" you'll see there's a huge amount of medical research (and speculation) dedicated to it.
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  As far as I'm aware, they have, and once you take that into account placebo only has a very limited effect in controlling self-reported pain and nausea, everything else was just bad statistics. http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak-regression-to-the-mean-is-the-main-reason-ineffective-treatments-appear-to-work/ http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak... Though as that article explains, shysters, whether practicing some kind of standard woo, or working for big pharma, are keen to continue to pretend they don't understand this as long as it's paying their salary.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway5752 9y ago
Are you sure that's true? Ask yourself why do they do double-blind experiments. I had read that depending on the illness, a non-active treatment (sugar pill) given to the control group improved their reported condition by significant and substantial margins over a population that did not get the fake treatment.

raverbashing 9y ago

But coin flips are very different from aerial maneuvers Regression to the mean notwhitstanding, you can "scold" but also correct something that was done wrong And if you got right the first time you'll have a tendency to half-ass it next times (as you already know how to do it if the need arises)

danesparza 9y ago
You missed the point of the last line of the story.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

danesparza 9y ago

TL;DR: It doesn't affect the outcome, so why not be nice?

EliRivers 9y ago
I believe this is a mis-reading. while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning The claim is that it does make a difference; being nice is better. It's easy to misread reversion to the mean as the result of praise / punishment.
- danesparza 9y ago
  I appreciate you sharing! Here's what I paid attention to: "because there is regression to the mean" and "I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback." I think the important part of that last sentence is "without any feedback" -- this is why I assert "It doesn't affect the outcome".

Jach 9y ago

Reminds me a bit of the Red Bean experiment. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMb_UKYHvto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMb_UKYHvto -- longer vid has some lesson summaries at the end https://youtu.be/JeWTD-0BRS4?t=19m39s https://youtu.be/JeWTD-0BRS4?t=19m39s) Too often trying to use praise or punishment to change the system is the wrong thing entirely, the underlying system is flawed.

tremendulo 9y ago

I suspect what truly works is (a) the instructor knows something that you don't know, (b) you want to learn it, (c) you establish communication. Praise and blame are an inherent part of that communication. In certain circumstances, especially where (b) is less true, then praise and blame get upgraded to reward and punishment. For example if you are a child at school. We like to say that people (especially children) shouldn't be punished; they should only be rewarded. And then we deny that we are still punishing them, after all, for example by silence and withdrawal. The reality is you aren't in a relationship if you only get praise and positivity. That feels meaningless or even creepy depending on the intensity. A genuine connection will feel positive/neutral most of the time and negative occasionally, since we are knowledge-creating entities. For example, in a computer game you're learning optimally if your win:lose ratio is somewhere around 80:20. I would guess this applies to our relationships too. Neither reward nor punishment will 'work' in the absence of the other. This is why tyrants go over the top with punishment, because all blame and no praise is lack of relationship too.

linkmotif 9y ago
I agree with you except in interpersonal relationships people tend to confuse “punishment” with meanness or losing one’s temper. There’s never a good reason to not be patient or to lose your temper. Having room for negativity is important, but communicating negativity is much more difficult than praise on many levels.
- tremendulo 9y ago
  I bet those who believe that anger is always and everywhere wrong are the ones who lose their temper. (They may go silent and direct the anger inwardly.) Those who use the anger will employ measured criticism and intensify their efforts.
  - linkmotif 9y ago
    Yes, how you employ/deploy your frustration or anger is everything. I still fail often. It’s probably my #1 top thing I wish to improve upon.

phasnox 9y ago

That sexy abstract.

bambax 9y ago

> I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. I thought the demonstration was going to be to set people in pairs, have one toss a coin and the other punish / scold him every time he didn't come up with tails ;-) That would help make the case that the positive effect of punishment is entirely due to chance.

baking 9y ago

An older and more effective demonstration is Deming's "Red Bead Experiment" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckBfbvOXDvU

flint 9y ago

There are brave pilots and old pilots, but few brave old pilots...there may be a bit more to it than a reversion to the mean.

matell 9y ago
or if taken to an extreme -- "he was an old, experienced kamikadze pilot".

jpalomaki 9y ago

For those finding this piece inspiring, I would recommend "The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds" by Michael Lewis [1]. The book is about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research. In my opinion a very good combination of telling the story of the main characters and also giving interesting points from their research. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Minds/dp/0393254593 https://www.amazon.com/Undoing-Project-Friendship-Changed-Mi...

ggm 9y ago

Be wary of applying this to thought experiments. As yourself what if the supposed reversal was not true, and I am only being told this? The 'gets better, gets worse' quality here, is contestable because the underlying "skill" is a phantom. There is no perversity, testing if a non-existent thing is a property of the system or not: thats a strong test in science. The perversity, is people's belief in the distinction of ability over something subject to random chance.

jstrebel 9y ago

Most real-life situations are not like that. The contingency assumes that your underlying process is random with a normal distribution. In everyday life, especially when working in teams or projects, processes are not of that kind. Other people are neither random, nor is their behaviour normally-distributed. The relative effectiveness of praising and scolding is unclear in such situations. So it seems unwise to transfer this anecdote to other contexts.