Learning from Mistakes

“Anything you experience is so much more vivid than if you’re just told about it.”
— Daniel Kahneman

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” ― Otto von Bismarck

How do we learn from mistakes of others and those we make ourselves?

The first we can perhaps best do by reading widely and incisively. The second is a bit trickier. Perhaps there is role of mindfulness or similar practices to identify our harmful habits and stop making same mistakes over and over again. Systems first, goals later.

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Quotes from "The Social Leap"

These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful. “The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.” “As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.” “Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions .” “When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than ...

The Upside of Disaster

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Gore-Tex and Serendipity

In the NYT, I read the obituary of Robert Gore , the inventor of Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is a porous material made of teflon (made of carbon and fluorine atoms; it repels water very easily). If you have used a hiking equipment, from tents to shoes to jackets, chances are that you've used Gore-Tex. He discovered the material by happenstance: "Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two. “Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”" It's a story that appeals to the chemist in me. It takes a tinkerer to test unlikely scenarios — it's not easy to acknowledge the limit of one's knowledge. For a chemical engineer, ...

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