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

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The Upside of Disaster

In the previous post , I talked about the tactics rational optimists use to deal with uncertainty: explore and exploit. There are situations where an utter disaster and the resulting uncertainty can change the history for the better. An amazing example is the story of human evolution from chimp-like apes. Here's a brief review of the story told by William von Hippel in “ The Social Leap .” These apes lived in the rainforests of eastern Africa, around 6 million years ago. They ruled the canopy. But then disaster struck. Eastern Africa was tearing away from the rest of the continent, due to plate tectonics. The climate changed. The rainforests disappeared. These apes had to adjust to living in the savannah, at the mercy of great predators. Humans reacted to this disaster by innovating and inventing. Human distinctions — from bipedalism, persistence hunting, to the use of language and tools and our social structure — ultimately are the results of that disaster. They learned to be grea

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