People do not 'learn from their mistakes'

People do not 'learn from their mistakes
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Imo, in the current environment, EVERYONE buys into this theory. We fire our mistakes. One mistake you are out. Experience counts for nothing and learning from our mistakes apparently impossible. Retaining your job after a mistake is a liability to EVERYONE.

You cannot pay your debt to society in any way shape or form because a monkey does not learn from his mistakes how can a human?
 
Quote from Eight:

I learned this decades ago from shooting baskets. I found that if I did not at all focus on what I did wrong when I missed [and pay no attention when I made a basket] but rather only focused on what I did right, my shooting abilities increased and oddly enough, people thought I was a good shooter without even tallying the score, I just made it look good... so there is hidden plusses to this type of thinking...

Something interesting to me is the contrast between how depressive people think versus non depressive people. Depressed people attribute their wins in life to the situation and their losses to themselves, non depressive people do the opposite.. so what you have is two sets of deluded folks really. I'm sort of depressive and have always worked really hard to overcome what I saw as my faults. What this will result in, and did for me in every arena, is that you look around and realize that all these successful people in your environment are truly mediocre but they just don't know it, how can they, they are deluded.. working with all these mediocre people is what drove me to trading really, I know I can excel but they will not give me much reward for it, trading otoh gives wonderful rewards to those that excel...
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You are very correct.

The problem might be that most traders think too much and thus never get to do much trading, same way as if you thought too much about throwing the shot, and did not actually throw that many, well, I guess you know where the ball would be most of the time?

There is something that is far more important than thinking.
 
You can learn from either doing something right or doing it wrong.

Add too much salt in the pot while making your chicken soup? A mistake. Don't do it again.

You can get information from positive or negative feedback.
 
Quote from WaveStrider:

You can learn from either doing something right or doing it wrong.

Add too much salt in the pot while making your chicken soup? A mistake. Don't do it again.

You can get information from positive or negative feedback.
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Very true but I do believe that the article showed that the brain behaves more positive when the outcome is positive, or having done it correctly.

Either way all that matters are the results.

If the results are bad then change what you are doing until the results are good, and do not keep doing what you are doing which is of course what most seem to do.
 
The OP is right. It comes down to reinforcement. We are reinforced by positive experience. Learn not to touch a hot stove is really rewarded by moving one's hand away. When I made terrible trades my mind seems to want to bury them yet I clearly remember my winners.

This however does not mean to say we don't learn from our mistakes. I have learned to not do certain things that have brought bad results in the past like during the mini pauses/pullback I refrained from buying market puts in a bull market because remember having burned too many times. It was the the bad experience that caused me to refrain myself. However it seems to req'd multiple bad experiences to cause it to stick whereas I have no such problem when I win.
 
Quote from MrCharts:

What you really learned was that your hand burns when it is put on something hot.

Not only will you not touch a hot stove again but you will not touch anything that gives off enough heat that will burn your hand.

You learned from your action of pulling your hand away and not from touching the stove, so you actually did learn from doing the right thing and not the wrong thing as you did not know the difference when you touched the stove, otherwise you would not have touched it.
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So he learned from the experience and not the mistake? I kind of disagree with you on this (in a friendly way)... Let me explain why.. First, I believe we do learn from our mistakes.. Let's take the story above for an example..

What comes first, the mistake or the experience? Clearly the mistake comes first then the experience.. So that being said.. We can clearly say we are learning from the mistake because the mistake creates the experience.

Just because he/she have learn from their mistakes doesn't mean they will not repeat them over again.. And that's the problem..

Most people do not have the mind control to stop repeating the same mistakes even if they learn from them.. I have learn from many of my mistakes but somehow I will repeat them over and over.. Does this sound familiar?
 
Quote from 4XQs:

This is pretty interesting:

The old adage that we "learn more from our mistakes" could be wrong, with new research showing our brain only learns from experience when we do something right.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5934013/People-do-not-learn-from-their-mistakes.html
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People learn from mistakes if they are painful enough.

To me blowing up an account would be painful enough
(I never blewup, I just profited and then gave back all the profits)

I don't understand why so many people who blew up, refund their account to blow up yet another account?
 
Old news, all of it.

Here is a link to the subject of "Neuroeconomics"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroeconomics

and in a couple of my posts I talk about what happened when I taught a couple of young guys to trade.

The bottom line is that our emotions are tied to our decision making process. In order to make progress we have to internalize our experiences in a positive way and that way is by integrating our experience with our "feelings". Otherwise, watching someone trade and saying "I understand, I get it" doesn't mean much.

Good luck, those who pursue this may (perhaps) get the REAL reason why so few make money in this business, and on a related subject, this is why papertrading has limited value (because it doesn't engage the emotions like real trading).

Stevesbg
 
You can learn from bad experiences, as long as you coach yourself in how to learn.

Takes a long time, and I've learned a lot on speeding up the process in Dr. Steenbarger's new book on coaching yourself. Well worth the read if you pay attention to the details in it. It can have the apearance of I've heard that before, but it is IMHO much more than that.
 
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