Quotes About Error

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere's adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A match you light to illuminate a darkened room turns out to have a completely different use when you open a doorway and discover a room with a pile of logs and a fireplace in it. A tool that helps you see in one context ends up helping you keep warm in another. That's the essence of exaptation.

Benjamin Franklin, who knew a few things about innovation himself, said it best: "Perhaps the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries. Truth is uniform and narrow; it constantly exists, and does not seem to require so much an active energy, as a passive aptitude of soul in order to encounter it. But error is endlessly diversified.

The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.

subtle case for the role of error in innovation, because error is not simply a phase you have to suffer through on the way to genius. Error often creates a path that leads you out of your comfortable assumptions. De Forest was wrong about the utility of gas as a detector, but he kept probing at the edges of that error, until he hit upon something that was genuinely useful. Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

The trouble with error is that we have a natural tendency to dismiss it.

be one of the key functions of the lab conference. In Dunbar's research, outsiders working on different problems were much less likely to dismiss the apparent error as useless noise. Coming at the problem from a different perspective, with few preconceived ideas about what the "correct" result was supposed to be, allowed them to conceptualize scenarios where the mistake might actually be meaningful.

Being correct is like the phase-lock states of the human brain, all the neurons firing in perfect synchrony. We need the phase-lock state for the same reason we need truth: a world of complete error and chaos would be unmanageable, on a social and a neurochemical level. (Not to mention genetic.) But leaving some room for generative error is important, too. Innovative environments thrive on useful mistakes, and suffer when the demands of quality control overwhelm them.

fallaciously pessimistic.

The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tells us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty - all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

In a noisy world in which misunderstanding and error are possible, Tit for Tat is bested by an even more forgiving strategy called Generous Tit for Tat. Every once in a while Generous Tit for Tat will randomly grant forgiveness to a defector and resume cooperating. The act of unconditional forgiveness can flick a duo that has been trapped in a cycle of mutual defection back onto the path of cooperation.

Because the cultures of politics and journalism are largely innocent of the scientific mindset, questions with massive consequences for life and death are answered by methods that we know lead to error, such as anecdotes, headlines, rhetoric, and what engineers call HiPPO (highest-paid person's opinion).

He who desires anything but God deceives himself, and he who loves anything but God errs miserably.

Love dies because its birth was an error.

The prideful, rational mind, comfortable with its certainty, enamoured of its own brilliance, is easily tempted to ignore error, and to sweep dirt under the rug. Literary, existential philosophers, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard, conceived of this mode of Being as "inauthentic." An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways his own experience has demonstrated false. He does not speak with his own voice.

Es la tendencia expansiva, exploratoria del hombre, su curiosidad innata, la que constituye a la vez una gracia salvadora y un error mortal.

Milton believed that stubborn refusal to change in the face of error not only meant ejection from heaven, and subsequent degeneration into an ever-deepening hell, but the rejection of redemption itself. Satan knows full well that even if he was willing to seek reconciliation, and God willing to grant it, he would only rebel again, because he will not change.

Those well positioned (and this is a great danger of moving up) have used their current competence—their cherished opinions, their present knowledge, their current skills—to stake a moral claim to their status. In consequence, they have little motivation to admit to error, to learn or change—and plenty of reason not to.

Extracting useful information from experience is difficult. It requires the purest of motivations ("things should be made better, not worse") to perform it properly. It requires the willingness to confront error, forthrightly, and to determine at what point and why departure from the proper path occurred.

Trocan su honor por una prebenda y echan llave a su dignidad por evitarse un peligro; renunciarían a vivir antes que gritar la verdad frente al error de muchos.

Religion, in refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime imputed to you; the government, in surrounding your case with mystery and shadow, gives reason for belief in some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, in venerating your memory and calling you martyrs, in no way acknowledges your guilt.

earth shall err concerning them, and they shall be altered from all their ways, they shall err and take them to be gods.

There is an extant copy of a document available over the Internet that is alleged to be a complete CRV manual, but because it is designed to address training, it does not address any of the issues regarding applications. But already there are many who are using it as a guide for applications as well as training, introducing further error into the system.

the general ignominy that is the corollary of insight, i.e., the ignominy of having thus far lived in error, of having failed, until the moment of so-called insight, to understand what could have been understood earlier, an ignominy only deepened by prospective shame, because the moment of insight serves as a reminder that more such moments lie ahead, and that one always goes forward in error.