Tag: failure

  • Sagan’s Cosmos on the Scientific Method and Uncomfortable Ideas

    I’m currently watching Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. I feel compelled to post the following quote from episode four, Heaven and Hell, as it stood out for its elegant argument for the strength of scientific ideas and for not rejecting uncomfortable (if incorrect) ideas: There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s all…

  • Recognising Bad Advice and Expertise Failure

    Why do we blindly follow experts when their advice is so often so wrong*? How can we differentiate between good advice and bad? These are just two of the questions David Freedman attempts to answer in Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us (a book that sounds like it could be a nice complement to Kathryn…

  • Scaling Success and Bright-Spot Analysis

    When there is a large-scale and wide-ranging problem that needs a solution, we shouldn’t attempt to solve it with an equally large solution but instead attempt to break the issue down and find outlying successes to replicate. That’s the wisdom of Dan and Chip Heath–authors of Made to Stick and Switch–saying that to solve complex…

  • On Being Wrong: Estimating Our Beliefs

    Following the forced retirement of Helen Thomas following her controversial comments on Israel and Palestine, Felix Salmon discusses how being wrong–and more importantly, the willingness to be wrong–is an admirable trait that should be applauded. In discussing this, Salmon points to a conversation between Tyler Cowen and Wil Wilkinson, where Cowen proposes: Take whatever your…

  • Ira Glass on Being Wrong and Manufacturing Inspiration

    Discussing how many great stories “hinge on people being wrong”, Kathryn Schulz interviews This American Life host Ira Glass on the benefits of being wrong. I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually…