Omelas

If you do not try new things you cannot notice when your existing things are wrong or not-quite-right (aka wrong). It's absolutely okay AND CORRECT to try things that sound ridiculous sometimes. The best long-term results come from a good mix of exploitation AND exploration. Don't get mad at yourself for trying new things, even when they seem silly and in fact fail! Exploration is good! Even when you're pretty sure _that_ instance of exploration was a poor plan, hey, you've got to explore your own sense of when exploration is a poor plan, too.

Yes, in the short term, every time your exploration fails to find something new and good, it would have been better to avoid exploration. But you can't know the result of the dice roll before you actually make the roll and look.

If you always castigate yourself for the exploration side of your optimization algorithms, you'll use exploration FAR LESS than you should. Now of course that doesn't mean you should just always explore. Usually there's a Way To Be that works pretty well and most of your actions should fall under the "works pretty well" category if you can manage it. But don't smother the exploration. That way lies stagnation.

It is absolutely okay and healthy in the long-term for our society to accommodate a minority of people with beliefs you're pretty sure are anathema. Not _all_ beliefs, not _all_ the time, not _persistent unending actions_. But always castigating them? Smothering that exploration? That's a huge loss over the long term. We absolutely need to explore whether it's actually perfectly okay to be gay, or to not have faith in a deity, or to divorce just because your life is worse with this partner, or to hire inequitably to redress systemic oppression, or to hire equitably despite systemic oppression, or to see if requiring most people to struggle to survive under capitalism produces lift-the-boat effects, or to see if safety nets produce flourishing without societal collapse. Otherwise we might stick with a bad version for way too long.

Be mindful, though! If your own exploration always ends up harming your ability to notice seductive scammers, rather than spreading the harm over many parts of you, then you won't be able to do very much exploration at all before it's just. not. worth it. Make sure you LOOK to see what's harmed and don't completely wreck some part of yourself through repeated, correlated harm in the name of finding out new things. Society: exploration is great, but if it's always, systemically, harming the same people, that total harm will be unacceptable. It may seem like a good bit of exploration if you just look at local cost-benefits, but if globally you're helping cause one as-innocent-as-anyone-else segment of society to completely wither and die, well, that bit of exploration probably wasn't a good idea. Blame the other people causing systemic oppression for taking up too much of the commons, if you want.