#error model

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Recently, I came across this rather striking essay by Livejournal user celandine13. It’s about performance - initially in the context of playing a musical instrument, but it generalizes to any learnable activity - and two views of mistake-making and self-improvement: the “error model” and the “bug model”

The “error model” is a model where mistakes are viewed as basically statistical error - where any given performance is perfect except for a bunch of random mistakes; this gives rise to a line of thinking where one can get rid of all imperfection just by training hard, and where mistakes are evidence of not having trained hard enough.

The “bug model”, on the other hand, is a model where mistakes are viewed more like computer software bugs, where mistakes are systematic and repeated performance will completely fail to get rid of the mistakes. Instead, it is necessary to explicitly identify what’s going wrong and then consciously fix that.

An example of the latter from my own life: back in my school days, I had swimming classes, 1 hour per week. For whatever reason, I was completely unable to learn to swim, even after years of these classes. Until I hit upon a particular key insight: in order to push oneself in a particular direction, one must push water in the opposite direction. Upon having this insight and applying it to the various swimming moves my teachers had tried to teach me, I went from completely-unable-to-swim to pretty-good-at-swimming within a timespan of minutes. This feels like about as central an example of “bug model” performance one can possibly get; I was lacking a very specific insight that blocked me from learning swimming, and once I gained that insight, I had no problems learning whatsoever. Bug FIXED. In retrospect, I’m a bit pissed that none of my teachers ever told me and instead just expected me to just instinctively figure out the purpose of the swimming moves. I had a chat with a friend some time ago, who told me that this insight was the very first thing that was taught in the swimming classes at her school - and that this was explained explicitly.

One thing that celandine13 observes in her essay is that this kind of thing, where students fail to progress because they hit a specific obstacle to understanding (e.g. things like my swimming thing, or failing to learn some mathematical concept), is very common, and that the “bug model” is strikingly effective at getting students past such hindrances in a way that the “error model” is not. This seems particularly true for kids with learning disabilities.

This goes further; as celandine13 notices, it’s so strikingly common that behaviors that look like stupidity or laziness can in fact be fixed by identifying and addressing specific underlying issues, to the point where she recognizes that she stops thinking of people as stupid or lazy and starts questioning the validity of the “stupid” and “lazy” concepts.

Basically, under the “bug model”, the word “stupid” unpacks to “you're performing badly and I don't know why“ and the word “lazy” unpacks to “you're not meeting your obligations and I don't know why”:

Once you start to think of mistakes as deterministic rather than random, as caused by "bugs" (incorrect understanding or incorrect procedures) rather than random inaccuracy, a curious thing happens. You stop thinking of people as "stupid." Tags like "stupid," "bad at ____", "sloppy," and so on, are ways of saying "You're performing badly and I don't know why."  Once you move it to "you're performing badly because you have the wrong fingerings," or "you're performing badly because you don't understand what a limit is," it's no longer a vague personal failing but a causal necessity.  Anyone who never understood limits will flunk calculus.  It's not you, it's the bug. This also applies to "lazy."  Lazy just means "you're not meeting your obligations and I don't know why."  If it turns out that you've been missing appointments because you don't keep a calendar, then you're not intrinsically "lazy," you were just executing the wrong procedure.  And suddenly you stop wanting to call the person "lazy" when it makes more sense to say they need organizational tools. "Lazy" and "stupid" and "bad at ____" are terms about the map, not the territory.  Once you understand what causes mistakes, those terms are far less informative than actually describing what's happening. 

This carries an implication: if person A uses words like “stupid” and “lazy” about person B, then it should be seen not as a value judgement of person B, but as a statement of person A’s ignorance - and failure as an educator if person A is set to educate person B in any way.

I have previously fumbled towards similar ideas, (e.g. here, where I put together an argument against the validity of the laziness concept; I have seen others make similar arguments, although they have been narrower, focusing mainly on executive dysfunction ... which IMO carries a bit of a risk of making “executive dysfunction” be seen as a fancy synonym for “laziness”), but celandine13′s essay does a better job of structuring and tying together these thoughts into a structured whole.

The subject seems to have a ton of ties to related subjects:

Social skills development: a lot of social skills deficiencies that are faced by autistics and other neurodiverse people tend to be things that can be mitigated (albeit not totally fixed) with a series of “bug model” type insights into social interactions, which makes it just tragic that the default model preferred by neurotypicals is to apply value judgements to such deficiencies, indicative of “error model” thinking.

Disability in general: the realsocialskills blog, which is among the ones I follow, is mostly a giant catalog of a remarkably large number of ways/situations where very real disability is misinterpeted as laziness or other ill will, with advice for people with disabilities on how to deal with that sort of shit, and caretakers for how to avoid committing such misinterpretations. Much of it feels like trying to use “bug model” thinking to fix problems caused by “error model” thinking.