Generative AI and the psychology of failed experiments

Deciding that an experiment has failed, and throwing away the work, can feel bad. I suspect that it often feels worse to throw away a day of work than a year of work. Why might this be true? There are some psychological reasons: A year-long project probably felt successful, or at least partially successful, for a while. Or, at least, it felt real. Doing something for a year is satisfying and looks significant. There's a floating1 anecdote about a writer who says that he spent all morning inserting a comma and all afternoon taking it out. Many people find it amusing and a bit sad to think of undoing a morning's work. But if the same person writes a whole bad novel, it's often taken to indicate a certain phase of a brilliant artist's career; it makes their corpus feel more weighty and respectable. Many year-long projects only take a fraction of our day-to-day time, whereas a day-long project is often our entire focus for the day. A failed one-day project can therefore feel like a…