Worse than Worthless

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Dec 30, 2013

There are things that are worthless-- that provide no value. There are also things that are worse than worthless-- things that provide negative value. I have found that people sometimes confuse the latter for the former, which can carry potentially dire consequences.

One simple example of this is in fencing. I once fenced with an opponent who put a bit of an unnecessary twirl on his blade when recovering from each parry. After our bout, one of the spectators pointed out that there wasn't any point to the twirls and that my opponent would improve by simply not doing them anymore. My opponent claimed that, even if the twirls were unnecessary, at worst they were merely an aesthetic preference that was useless but not actually harmful.

However, the observer explained that any unnecessary movement is harmful in fencing, because it spends time and energy that could be put to better use-- even if that use is just recovering a split second faster! [1]

During our bout, I indeed scored at least one touch because my opponent's twirling recovery was slower than a less flashy standard movement. That touch could well be the difference between victory and defeat; in a real sword fight, it could be the difference between life and death.

This isn't, of course, to say that everything unnecessary is damaging. There are many things that we can simply be indifferent towards. If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.

In other words, the real damage is dealt when something is not only unnecessary, but consumes resources that could instead be used for productive tasks. We see this relatively easily when it comes to matters of money, but when it comes to wastes of time and effort, many fail to make the inductive leap.

[1] Miyamoto Musashi agrees:

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.

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Perhaps you and your opponent were simply optimizing for different goals ? For example, it's possible that your goal was "defeat the opponent as quickly as possible", whereas his was "defeat the opponent while looking as good as possible (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" or "defeat the opponent whose challenge level falls within some optimal range, handicapping self if needed (in order to derive maximum enjoyment from the task)" . Your opponent may or may not have been aware of his true goals at the time.

My point is, it's kind of tricky to declare an action "worse than worthless" without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.

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My point is, it's kind of tricky to declare an action "worse than worthless" without having very detailed information about all of the actors involved.

A fair point. Note, though, that my opponent said that his aesthetic preference was "useless but not actually harmful." This post is intended to show how such preferences can, in fact, be harmful rather than merely useless.

It is certainly possible that someone would care more about aesthetics than about winning and be willing to accept that tradeoff-- but in this case, the fact that it even was a tradeoff went unrecognized.

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If I am about to go and fence a bout, the color of the shirt that I wear under my jacket is of no concern to me-- but if I had spent significant time before the bout debating over what shirt to wear instead of training, it would become a damaging detail rather than a meaningless one.

Unfortunately, worrying about whether you should worry is also harmful for the same reasons. Luckily, that question should resolve itself more quickly, so it should be a net benefit.

However, in more difficult cases, worrying about whether your should worry is harder to resolve and takes more time than the worrying; when this is generalized to "how much should I worry", it can balloon to an absurd degree, and become far more harmful than the potential worst case of the worry. And correctly calibrating the appropriate amount of worry in advance requires knowing how bad the possible consequences are, which requires resolving the worry.....

In short: It is very possible to overshoot and become too pessimistic, and "how much should I worry" is a common manifestation of it. Or even shorter: Anxiety disorders are a bitch.

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My intuitive sense is that for most people, considering whether it is worth worrying about something which will come up regularly (especially with unknown frequency) bounds [amount of time wasted] from above with a constant, which should be beneficial in general. It sounds like an anxiety disorder could bloat this constant to the point of uselessness, in which case obviously the calculus would be different.

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Despite being at +13, this post has been somewhat controversial, with a positive vote ratio of only 73%-- I'd be interested in hearing what caused some people to downvote it.

My current feeling is that this comment should have been part of the original post-- I thought it was implicit, but evidently this was not the case. Therefore, I'm especially interested in hearing comments from downvoters who downvoted the post for reasons other than the above.

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Well, I didn't downvote it, but I did think it was using an unnecessary number of words to communicate the idea that opportunity costs exist.

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I've had many just such experiences in various sorts of gaming (World of Warcraft, D&D), attempting to teach less-experienced players how to play effectively. (I can elaborate if anyone wants.) I can attest that there's definitely a common attitude of "well, at most this is doing no good, and it's how I like to play".

In fact, one particular aspect of this is that people seem to place value on personalization — doing things their way. The problem is, if there exists some optimally-effective way of doing things, then most deviations are likely to make performance worse (quite often because, as the OP says, the modified/added action consumes resources or otherwise has an opportunity cost).

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~Goes and tries to teach people that the most efficient way to entertain yourself is to mash the "Steady Shot" button over and over~

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Yes, but it would be silly to ignore that value added by personalization. If I can enjoy my character more by giving them a flaw which is detrimental to their tactics - always attacking orcs first because of some childhood trauma, even if there are more threatening enemies on the grid - that may be more valuable to me than the increased efficacy of attacking in the order most likely to result in the quickest resolution to the battle. Similarly, some of these "worse than worthless" things may be worth the value in style or sentiment that they lose in efficacy.

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Also, the question is not "does the personalization value outweigh the reduction in efficiency"; the question is whether the person recognizes the fact that there is a reduction. If you say "yes, I know this is strictly less efficient, but I choose to take the efficiency hit, because I value the roleplaying benefit more" — then fine. If you say "this isn't any worse! and I like it better like this!" — that's something else.

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"Always attacking orcs first" is not the sort of thing I am talking about; I am referring to the sort of thing that has no real roleplaying significance.

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