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The Importance of Saying "Oops" — LessWrong

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I just finished reading a history of Enron’s downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room, which hereby wins my award for “Least Appropriate Book Title.” An unsurprising feature of Enron’s slow rot and abrupt collapse was that the executive players never admitted to having made a large mistake. When catastrophe #247 grew to such an extent that it required an actual policy change, they would say, “Too bad that didn’t work out—it was such a good idea—how are we going to hide the problem on our balance sheet?” As opposed to, “It now seems obvious in retrospect that it was a mistake from the beginning.” As opposed to, “I’ve been stupid.” There was never a watershed moment, a moment of humbling realization, of acknowledging a fundamental problem. After the bankruptcy, Jeff Skilling, the former COO and brief CEO of Enron, declined his own lawyers’ advice to take the Fifth Amendment; he testified before Congress that Enron had been a great company. Not every change is an improvement, but every imp

x The Importance of Saying "Oops" — LessWrong Thinking Better on Purpose Changing Your Mind Epistemology Honesty Self-Deception Sunk-Cost Fallacy Frontpage 312 The Importance of Saying "Oops" by Eliezer Yudkowsky 5th Aug 2007 3 min read 40 312 I just finished reading a history of Enron’s downfall, The Smartest Guys in the Room , which hereby wins my award for “Least Appropriate Book Title.” An unsurprising feature of Enron’s slow rot and abrupt collapse was that the executive players never admitted to having made a large mistake. When catastrophe #247 grew to such an extent that it required an

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