Talk:Trial and error

Focused trials

TRIZ is a useful alternative approach to discovery. It differs markedly.

Praising error

Every time we attempt something we have a trial. If anything goes wrong in the attempt, we have an error. This makes trial and error exceedingly common in our lives. One curious effect is that when we succeed, then we have learned nothing new; that was what we expected. Yet that is the preferred and desired result.

We don't like it when we fail, but if we are wise, we will take each failure as an opportunity to learn something new. Thus, in a sense, failure is more valuable than success, in the long term. One formulation of this happy fact is Karpinski's maxim, "Anything worth doing, is worth doing badly, at first."

Jeff Raskin added those last two words before he included it in his seminal book, "The Humane Interface". Then it made more sense to him. I had previously preferred to let listeners ponder the absurdity of my claim for a while as a kind of zen exercise.

In fact, a central feature of venture capital in Silicon Valley, that hotbed of innovation in electronic technology, is that when you have failed in your first attempt to start a valuable company, you are not considered a worthless loser. Instead, to the venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, you are now an experienced executive, suitable to be funded to start another company.

We could even claim that failure is good for the soul. It teaches humility, and many lessons of what to beware of. Yet this view, so valuable in high technology ventures, is held very few places in the world.

Karpinski (talk) 00:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC) guess and check —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.109.147.205 (talk) 04:28, 8 September 2010 (UTC)