Making good mistakes
If at first you don't succeed, the chances are that you're making progress, says Kathryn Schulz.
I've spent the past five years becoming an expert in wrongness. This is the kind of career that makes people look at you oddly at cocktail parties. As professions go, wrongology - as we might call it - has something in common with entomology, in that the objects of study, in this case mistakes rather than insects, are widely despised. Indeed, in computer terminology, mistakes are known as ‘bugs', and that's generally how the rest of us view them as well: as the ickiest and most irritating inhabitant of the intellectual kingdom.
Most of us think about insects only for long enough to swat, scream or call the exterminator. The same goes for error: to the extent that we think seriously about mistakes, it is largely in the interest of eradicating them. What's more, we often take the steady reduction (and, ideally, eventual elimination) of errors to be both the means and the hallmark of success. The student who makes fewer mistakes eventually improves her grade from a B- to an A+. The company that succeeds in reducing its mistakes (sometimes all the way down to the holy grail of six sigma - just 3.4 errors per million opportunities to err) triumphantly announces its success to partners and shareholders. In these domains and others, making fewer mistakes is seen as all but synonymous with progress.
This attitude toward progress and error works quite well in certain contexts. If your goal is to achieve a specific, uniform and pre-ordained outcome, you will be well served by focusing on the elimination of mistakes. Want every English-speaking child in the world to spell the word 'enough' the same way? You can achieve that by correcting their kids' errors as they arise. Want every brake pad coming off your assembly line to be exactly 10 millimetres thick? Ditto: reduce mistakes in your manufacturing process and you'll get closer to your goal.
The problem, of course, is that most of life is far from predictable, uniform and pre-ordained. Significant creative, intellectual and practical breakthroughs are hardly ever planned in advance. We rarely know ahead of time precisely what outcome we seek, and even when we think we know the ideal outcome, we're often wrong. We endeavour to make progress in countless domains where specificity, uniformity and foreknowledge are impossible, from advances in science and technology to happier relationships, better parenting and peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In these contexts, trying to eliminate mistakes in the name of progress is not only impossible but also potentially counterproductive and dangerous. It is impossible to eliminate misunderstandings and mistakes in our personal relationships, for instance. Human beings are too complex and variable, and our inner workings too opaque (often to others but sometimes even to ourselves), to imagine that we could consistently get one another exactly right. It is counterproductive to eliminate mistakes in research and development, where it is sometimes the errors that yield the greatest advances. Finally, it is dangerous to try to eliminate mistakes (or putative mistakes) within a community, culture, political system or nation. The dream of an error-free society is the dream of utopia, and however enduring and seemingly optimistic that dream may be, utopias almost always either fail or veer towards fascism. If a community believes in its own perfection, after all, it is free to brand dissidents as dangerously wrong, and therefore to make them legitimate targets of suppression.
Embracing mistakes
Plainly, we need an alternative theory of progress that hinges not on the eradication of mistakes but on their perpetuation. Such an alternative theory already exists, having emerged during the Scientific Revolution through that era's hallmark development, the scientific method. Today, every student knows the gist of the method: observations lead to hypotheses (which must be testable) that are then subjected to experiments (whose results must be reproducible). If all goes well, the outcome is a theory: a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon.
As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate towards trying to verify our beliefs, whereas scientists gravitate towards falsification: as a community, if not as individuals, they seek to prove their beliefs wrong. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new ideas and discoveries. The leading minds of western Europe quickly took this principle and generalised it, arguing that not only scientific theories but also political, social and even aesthetic beliefs are subject to this same pattern of collapse, replacement and advancement. In this model, errors do not stand between us and progress; instead, they edge us incrementally towards it.
This is the Enlightenment understanding of error, and it is also the enlightened one. The failure of an experiment, the upending of a belief, even the collapse of an entire worldview: far from being intrinsically catastrophic, this friction between expectation and outcome is what sets fire to our curiosity. And curiosity is the force that propels us on to the path of discovery.
For our own enlightenment, then - or, better still, for what we might call a collective 21st century enlightenment - we would do well to adopt this attitude towards error. But what would it mean, in practical terms, to cultivate such an attitude? It would mean loosening our grip on our overwhelming and often corrosive need to be right. It would mean ceasing to regard errors as embarrassing and abhorrent, ceasing to torment both ourselves and others for making mistakes. It would mean creating classrooms, workplaces and cultures that promote exploration and discovery rather than rewarding correct answers and punishing mistakes.
This is not to say that errors are always benign; none of us wants to see tragic mistakes in high-stakes domains such as aviation or medicine. Even in these situations, however, we are poorly served by having only one tool in our tool chest: the drive to eradicate error. Safety experts know that eradicating error is impossible and, moreover, unnecessary. To make a system safer, you don't need to eliminate mistakes, just their potentially harmful consequences.
As any entomologist can tell you, virtually all eradication projects succumb to the law of unintended consequences. Take the insects out of their ecological niche and pretty soon you won't have any hummingbirds, marmots or mountain lions, either. This analogy is also true of other spheres of life. Even if we could miraculously eliminate all possibility of error from the human mind - say, by developing some kind of cognitive DDT and drenching everybody in mistakicide - would we want to? By eradicating mistakes, would we also be destroying our most fertile ground?
Kathryn Schulz is a journalist and author. Kathryn Schulz's book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, is published by Portobello Books.
I've spent the past five years becoming an expert in wrongness. This is the kind of career that makes people look at you oddly at cocktail parties. As professions go, wrongology - as we might call it - has something in common with entomology, in that the objects of study, in this case mistakes rather than insects, are widely despised. Indeed, in computer terminology, mistakes are known as ‘bugs', and that's generally how the rest of us view them as well: as the ickiest and most irritating inhabitant of the intellectual kingdom.
Most of us think about insects only for long enough to swat, scream or call the exterminator. The same goes for error: to the extent that we think seriously about mistakes, it is largely in the interest of eradicating them. What's more, we often take the steady reduction (and, ideally, eventual elimination) of errors to be both the means and the hallmark of success. The student who makes fewer mistakes eventually improves her grade from a B- to an A+. The company that succeeds in reducing its mistakes (sometimes all the way down to the holy grail of six sigma - just 3.4 errors per million opportunities to err) triumphantly announces its success to partners and shareholders. In these domains and others, making fewer mistakes is seen as all but synonymous with progress.
This attitude toward progress and error works quite well in certain contexts. If your goal is to achieve a specific, uniform and pre-ordained outcome, you will be well served by focusing on the elimination of mistakes. Want every English-speaking child in the world to spell the word 'enough' the same way? You can achieve that by correcting their kids' errors as they arise. Want every brake pad coming off your assembly line to be exactly 10 millimetres thick? Ditto: reduce mistakes in your manufacturing process and you'll get closer to your goal.
The problem, of course, is that most of life is far from predictable, uniform and pre-ordained. Significant creative, intellectual and practical breakthroughs are hardly ever planned in advance. We rarely know ahead of time precisely what outcome we seek, and even when we think we know the ideal outcome, we're often wrong. We endeavour to make progress in countless domains where specificity, uniformity and foreknowledge are impossible, from advances in science and technology to happier relationships, better parenting and peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In these contexts, trying to eliminate mistakes in the name of progress is not only impossible but also potentially counterproductive and dangerous. It is impossible to eliminate misunderstandings and mistakes in our personal relationships, for instance. Human beings are too complex and variable, and our inner workings too opaque (often to others but sometimes even to ourselves), to imagine that we could consistently get one another exactly right. It is counterproductive to eliminate mistakes in research and development, where it is sometimes the errors that yield the greatest advances. Finally, it is dangerous to try to eliminate mistakes (or putative mistakes) within a community, culture, political system or nation. The dream of an error-free society is the dream of utopia, and however enduring and seemingly optimistic that dream may be, utopias almost always either fail or veer towards fascism. If a community believes in its own perfection, after all, it is free to brand dissidents as dangerously wrong, and therefore to make them legitimate targets of suppression.
Embracing mistakes
Plainly, we need an alternative theory of progress that hinges not on the eradication of mistakes but on their perpetuation. Such an alternative theory already exists, having emerged during the Scientific Revolution through that era's hallmark development, the scientific method. Today, every student knows the gist of the method: observations lead to hypotheses (which must be testable) that are then subjected to experiments (whose results must be reproducible). If all goes well, the outcome is a theory: a logically consistent, empirically tested explanation for a natural phenomenon.
As an ideal of intellectual inquiry and a strategy for the advancement of knowledge, the scientific method is essentially a monument to the utility of error. Most of us gravitate towards trying to verify our beliefs, whereas scientists gravitate towards falsification: as a community, if not as individuals, they seek to prove their beliefs wrong. This was the pivotal insight of the Scientific Revolution: that the advancement of knowledge depends on current theories collapsing in the face of new ideas and discoveries. The leading minds of western Europe quickly took this principle and generalised it, arguing that not only scientific theories but also political, social and even aesthetic beliefs are subject to this same pattern of collapse, replacement and advancement. In this model, errors do not stand between us and progress; instead, they edge us incrementally towards it.
This is the Enlightenment understanding of error, and it is also the enlightened one. The failure of an experiment, the upending of a belief, even the collapse of an entire worldview: far from being intrinsically catastrophic, this friction between expectation and outcome is what sets fire to our curiosity. And curiosity is the force that propels us on to the path of discovery.
For our own enlightenment, then - or, better still, for what we might call a collective 21st century enlightenment - we would do well to adopt this attitude towards error. But what would it mean, in practical terms, to cultivate such an attitude? It would mean loosening our grip on our overwhelming and often corrosive need to be right. It would mean ceasing to regard errors as embarrassing and abhorrent, ceasing to torment both ourselves and others for making mistakes. It would mean creating classrooms, workplaces and cultures that promote exploration and discovery rather than rewarding correct answers and punishing mistakes.
This is not to say that errors are always benign; none of us wants to see tragic mistakes in high-stakes domains such as aviation or medicine. Even in these situations, however, we are poorly served by having only one tool in our tool chest: the drive to eradicate error. Safety experts know that eradicating error is impossible and, moreover, unnecessary. To make a system safer, you don't need to eliminate mistakes, just their potentially harmful consequences.
As any entomologist can tell you, virtually all eradication projects succumb to the law of unintended consequences. Take the insects out of their ecological niche and pretty soon you won't have any hummingbirds, marmots or mountain lions, either. This analogy is also true of other spheres of life. Even if we could miraculously eliminate all possibility of error from the human mind - say, by developing some kind of cognitive DDT and drenching everybody in mistakicide - would we want to? By eradicating mistakes, would we also be destroying our most fertile ground?
Kathryn Schulz is a journalist and author. Kathryn Schulz's book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, is published by Portobello Books.
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