On Expected Success Rates
I just learned that when professional, world-record-breaking paper airplane people throw a paper airplane that they just made for the first time, like 90% of the time it doesn't fly how they want, intend, or expect.
And this is a pretty great example of how much time, effort, mental energy, and coping spoons we can end up wasting if we have the wrong expectation of what the base rate of something is.
No one says that the act of making a paper airplane has a 90% "failure" rate simply due to small imperfections in the paper, hard-to-measure asymmetries in the paper and the folding, and so on.
Which is kinda important! That changes everything about how we should interpret all available information and empirical feedback that we get from throwing freshly made paper planes!
All my life, I thought that following the instructions is supposed to reliably produce a working paper plane, that basically flies as well as the design allows. So when it flies badly, that's either a flawed airplane design, or it's my fault - if the design is basically good then I must've folded it badly or I threw it badly.
But now I know that's just totally off-base. Even if you fold and throw with great skill, even world-class skill, we should still expect each new plane to fly "badly" a big majority of the time.
So the reality is that we're supposed to view the first few throws as measurements of what's wrong with the plane, and make small adjustments - little extra bends, adding curves or creases here or there to change how it flies.
When we think the base rate of paper airplanes flying as designed is pretty high, it's natural to think that the best way to get better results is to improve our skills of designing, making, and throwing. Once you know that base rate is only 10%, suddenly it's clear that you get far bigger results by slightly fiddling with the tips/edges of the plane you already made.
And that can be enough to make the difference between giving up and sticking with it; between frustratingly giving it your all but getting nowhere and just casually getting better; between confidently believing that the activity requires "talent" and knowing that you too could get better at it if you knew the right things.
I love contemplating how actually scary this is. Nothing in horror movies affects me anymore but I get the most wonderful chills from the idea of these beautiful, haunting, mindless things just hovering in this murky water like a minefield for anyone foolish enough to go swimming or unlucky enough to fall in. How it’s still not as bad as being a fish small enough for them to paralyze and consume. How they regularly paralyze and consume fish but evolved before anything like a fish ever existed. A fish is such a complex creature that can see and think and navigate and be afraid but sometimes it touches these brainless, boneless, ghostly things that were just already there, millions of years sooner, and it dies and it never understands why that is. The thing that killed it and ate it doesn’t know either, it doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have enough of a brain to even realize it has killed and eaten something. Some of its cells simply fired little harpoons into the cells of the other thing, and squirted deadly chemicals into them, and hauled up the paralyzed body to digest it. It’s a spider’s web without a spider but it still fills things with venom and eats them. :)
The best jellyfish are those that seem to trail off into forever. Like Chrysaora achlyos my beloved…
Images like that haunted me as a kid
I just had a small epiphany why you might like other people's art more than your own:
It's the lack of suspension of disbelief.
When you see something someone else has drawn or painted, you take in the content faster than you take in the technical aspects. You experience it as pseudo-real, the same way you stop perceiving animated characters as drawn or book characters as written as you get into the story.
On the other hand, when you yourself have made something, all you see is the machine behind the theater, so to speak. You're probably thinking about lines, shading, coloring in a "does this make sense? Is this the best decision I could have made?"-kind of way.
I think that's also why sometimes, pictures you haven't looked at for a long time starts looking nice to you again, à la: "Hey past-me was unto something! Why can't I replicate it nowadays?". It's probably specifically because you've forgotten the process of making it that you are now seeing it with fresh eyes.
Art is an illusion, but a magician has a hard time tricking themself. So don't be so hard on yourself: it's probably just that you can't see the magic right now, but that doesn't mean it's not there.
when i was post op after top surgery i had a good friend there with me to help recover. but the nurse didnt get the memo and when i woke up she was like “ok i’m gonna go get your girlfriend and bring her in to see you!” and i remember being so zonked on anesthesia and so disoriented i just laid there thinking wow…… all that an they’re bringing me a girlfriend too this place is amazing