Slashdot Mirror
Some People Just Never Learn
Iddo Genuth writes "German scientists recently showed what many of us suspected but could not prove — some people just don't learn. The German researchers have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors. The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation are less successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry this genetic mutation. This finding has the potential to improve our understanding of the causes of addictive and compulsive behaviors."
I call them "co workers"
...all those people who voted for Bush the second time.
Apparently the editors have this genetic deficiency as well: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/08/1414258
I was diagnosed with some sort of generic learning disability when I was a teen.
I tend to bang my brain against new concepts again and again, until I finally understand them in big chunks. I tend to overlook the obvious, and go for the bizarre interpretations of things.
So I often find myself in situations where I feel stupid for not grasping something that is readily apparent to most everyone else, but at the same time I've been successful with teaching myself certain concepts other people wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole.
For instance, I've taught myself how to program in Haskell, whereas most programmers run screaming from anything with more than a minimal functional paradigm component. It did take me quite a while to get some concepts in Haskell, though.
-------
Incite and flee.
Well, while the notion that Germany (thanks to its association with Adolf Hitler) is somehow prone to being considered 'racist' is really wasted brain bandwidth. For thousands of years people have hated the Jews for various reasons, both correct and incorrect, founded and unfounded, stupid and otherwise. The reality of "antisemitism" (consider the fact that the word even EXISTS... is there a similar word for hating other ethnic or social groups?! There might be, but I can't think of any) is that it's a sentiment that goes beyond any borders, nationality or social background. The Jews were driven from the middle east because people didn't like them. (Don't need to go into why) They were spread across Europe and continued into their essentially forced move and migrations across the planet largely because anywhere they went, people didn't like them. Again, the reasons why are irrelevant in reporting the reality of the reasons why Jews were no longer in Israel and Israel ceased to exist for a very long time.
I guess I'm drifting away from my point here so to bring it back, I'm just saying that Germans hold no monopoly over hating Jews. There are LOTS of people who had done horrible things to them in the past.
> ...doesn't it mean it has some evolutionary advantages?
Yes.
"Will you go out with me Saturday night?"
"I wouldn't go out with you on Saturday if you paid me $1 million."
"What are you doing next weekend then?"
Persistence in the face of negative feedback sometimes is a winning strategy.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
So perhaps they won't invade Poland a third time?
HTH
It's also unclear whether the behaviour is properly labeled. "Learn from your mistakes" is a phrase that assumes your choice and its consequences are clear: do this or do that, and if "this" leads to bad consequences, why, you need to "learn from your mistake" and do "that" instead.
But real life is not nearly so simple. First, there are many cases where people don't see all the choices, or even any choice. You can't be guilty of failing to learn from your mistakes if you're not even aware of the alternate choices you could be making.
Second, it's only in fairly restricted cases that a perfectly clear connection can be drawn from choice to consequences. If you try to beat the train at the RR crossing and get creamed, well, that one's easy. But what if you take a job at X corporation and are then unhappy five years later? Is it really the job, or is it the crappy marriage that you contracted, too? More importantly, how do you really know that if you'd not taken a job at X corporation, you'd be happier? Maybe things would be even worse! Real-life choices are usually befogged by the difficulty of being sure of the connection between choice and consequences, and by the difficulty of accurately guessing what the consequences of alternate choices might have been.
Finally, there is sufficient statistical noise in many choices that sometimes the best decision is not to "learn from your mistakes." We call that "persistence" and give great credit to people who display it, when their continued "failure" to learn from their mistakes eventually pays off. The guy who starts business after business, each failing, until he finally hits on the one that pays off. The athlete who comes in 2nd and 3rd, time after time, until eventually he wins. We can go back and, with 20/20 hindsight, argue that he did "learn from his mistakes" in that he didn't do the same thing in exactly the same way again. But it's still the case that on the topmost issue, the main choice, he "failed to learn from his mistakes" by deliberately choosing to do again and again something at which he failed again and again. Until one day, he didn't.
For all these reasons, I think the definition of what it means to "learn from your mistakes" in real life (as opposed to the narrow world of the academic psych lab) is pretty problematic.