Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Make your million mistakes early
Pulling mistakes forward
Every mistake made early is one that cannot be made later. Pull them all forward to yesterday and, in theory, you would never make another. That means widening the aperture massively at the beginning, trying many things, and tightening it as you learn. It also happens to be a great way to find your passion.
Risk and age
Risk belongs in the early years because the downside is smallest then. With little to lose, a person can massively screw up and nobody holds it against them unless it involves fraud. The downside grows with age, and it grows faster for someone who comes from privilege or a higher foundation, which makes forcing the risk harder for them.
Intelligent risk
The risk has to be intelligent. Advice from society leans toward the safe path, which is the same general partner and limited partner problem: what suits the adviser can differ from what suits the person.
Why does exploring early pay off most?
Computer scientists study this as the multi-armed bandit problem, formalized by statistician Herbert Robbins in 1952. A gambler faces slot machines with unknown payouts and must choose between trying new machines and replaying the best one found so far. The more pulls remain, the more it pays to explore, because a good discovery gets used many times. As the number of remaining pulls shrinks, the best strategy shifts toward repeating what has worked.
How does simulated annealing mirror widening then narrowing?
Simulated annealing is a search method published by Scott Kirkpatrick, Daniel Gelatt, and Mario Vecchi in a 1983 paper in Science. It borrows from annealing in metalwork, where slowly cooling a material lets its atoms settle into a stable structure. The algorithm starts at a high temperature, accepting many random and even worse moves, and cools gradually until it accepts fewer. This early randomness helps it avoid getting stuck in a mediocre solution. The paper applied the method to the placement of components on computer chips.
More from Joys of Compounding
