Quotes About Error

So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or incentives for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

And, what's worse, we didn't get where we are today thanks to policy makers—but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect.

Per il robusto un errore è informazione, per il debole un errore è solo un errore

Charlatan" was held to be a synonym for empirick. The word "empiric" designated someone who relied on experiment and experience to ascertain what was correct. In other words, trial and error and tinkering. That was held to be inferior—professionally, socially, and intellectually. It is still not considered to be very "intelligent.

Popper expuso el mecanismo de las conjeturas y las refutaciones, que funciona como sigue: se formula una conjetura (osada) y se empieza a buscar la observación que demostraría que estamos en un error. Ésta es la alternativa a nuestra búsqueda de casos confirmatorios. Si pensamos que la tarea es fácil, quedaremos decepcionados: pocos seres humanos tienen la habilidad natural de hacerlo.

He paid no price for the mistake.

as he mistook me for someone else and had no clue about what I was discussing.

later legitimized by some type of formalization. The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

types of errors is the most rational thing to do, when the errors are of little cost, as they lead to discoveries. For instance, most medical "discoveries" are accidental to something else. An error-free world would have no penicillin, no chemotherapy…almost no drugs, and most probably no humans.

the project managers incur only small errors and can adapt to them.

we know a lot more what is wrong than what is right

Bricolage is a form of trial and error close to tweaking, trying to make do with what you've got by recycling pieces that would be otherwise wasted.

The benefits of procrastination apply similarly to medical procedures: we saw that procrastination protects you from error as it gives nature a chance to do its job, given the inconvenient fact that nature is less error-prone than scientists.

their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

And one needs to be rational in not making trial and error completely random.

Or take the health category. Adding is on the left, removing to the right. Removing medication, or some other unnatural stressor—say, gluten, fructose, tranquilizers, nail polish, or some such substance—by trial and error is more robust than adding medication, with unknown side effects, unknown in spite of the statements about "evidence" and shmevidence.

Further, the random element in trial and error is not quite random, if it is carried out rationally, using error as a source of information. if every trial provides you with information about what does not work, you start zooming in on a solution - so every attempt becomes more valuable, more like an expense than an error. And of course you make discoveries along the way.

Pero hay otros problemas que surgen de nuestra ceguera ante el Cisne Negro: a) Nos centramos en segmentos preseleccionados de lo visto, y a partir de ahí generalizamos en lo no visto: el error de la confirmación.

Someone who predicts will be fragile to prediction errors.

the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill.

confusing intensity with frequency.

but their error rate is so large that it is far more significant than the projection itself!

Conversely, when you think you know more than you do, you are fragile (to error).