In his book Intuition Pump and Other Intuition ToolsDaniel Dennett’s first pump of intuition is to admire the virtues of making bold mistakes. He describes it this way:
Sometimes you just don’t want to danger making mistakes; you actually want to do them – as long as it gives you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to progress. Of course there are times when it is very important not to make mistakes – ask any surgeon or pilot. But it is not widely appreciated that there are times when making mistakes is the only way to go. Many students who arrive at highly competitive universities pride themselves on not making mistakes – after all, that’s the path they’ve traveled further than their classmates, or been led to believe. I often find that I have to encourage them develop a habit making mistakes, the best learning opportunities. They get “writer’s block” and waste hours wandering back and forth on the first line. “Get out!” I urge them. Then there is something on the page for them to work on.
This reminds me of an old joke about how one should carve an elephant out of granite. A tongue-in-cheek tip is to just start with a big hunk of granite, then cut out all the parts that don’t look like an elephant. Dennett advocates a similar approach – throw an unaltered granite block of your thoughts out there, and let all the inactive parts be removed as your mistakes are discovered and corrected.
Dennett happily describes herself as “a seasoned error maker myself. I have made dillies, and I hope to make more. ” But there’s a key to being a good mistake maker, Dennett says, and that’s being willing, and eager, to let your ideas go:
The main trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – especially not to yourself. Instead of denying denial when you make a mistake, you have to be the master of your mistakes, turn them in your mind as if they were works of art, the way they are…The trick is to take advantage of some details of the mess you made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.
Mistakes are good when they are quickly identified, corrected, and learned from. I’m on record as believing that Many new ideas are bad – and this is true whether the new ideas come from private players in the market, or from policy makers working in government. The key difference is that in markets, the identification and correction of errors is fast, but the same cannot be said for the errors of policy makers.
For example, in my post explaining that most new ideas are bad, I used the example of an upcoming technology product called the R1 Rabbit, and why I thought it would be a flop. As I wrote that, the product was released, and the consensus that has emerged since then is that the product is, indeed, it’s very bad. Another product I would have mentioned in that post is the Humane AI pin, which seemed over baked to me. This, too, seems to be it becomes general consensus, and currently Humane sees the product he came back at a faster rate than they can sell.
I suspect both these companies are not far from this world. A lot of time, effort, and money was spent on building companies and producing products. Some people end up spending money for a half-baked product. This isn’t ideal at all – but the fix is happening quickly.
Contrast this with another bad policy I recently made highlightedwhen “King William III pushed for a tax on windows, with the idea that houses and buildings with lots of windows probably belonged to the rich, so this would be a way to tax the rich.” But, as written in Scott Hodge’s book Taxocracy“the tax ‘led to dire conditions for the urban poor, as landlords boarded up their windows and built tenements without enough light and air.’ Some buildings were built without windows on some floors which led to ‘the spread of many diseases such as diarrhoea, bubbling ulcer, and typhus.’”
This, too, was less than ideal. It caused people to live in unnecessarily miserable, dark, and crowded conditions. Diseases spread rapidly, killing many people and causing great pain and suffering to those who survived. This, too, was eventually fixed – the tax was eventually repealed. But the tax and its negative effects lasted a long time 150 years before that happens.
Entrepreneurs are not necessarily smarter than government policy makers, and they don’t have the innate ability to come up with better ideas. But when entrepreneurs make mistakes, the mistake doesn’t last long. Policy makers can make mistakes that cause disease, suffering, and death and those policies can take many lives before the mistake is corrected.
Arnold Kling used to use the phrase “Markets fail. Use markets.” Yes – because when markets fail, they fail quickly and they correct quickly. Dennett advises his readers to be careful not to hide their mistakes, especially from themselves. But government policymakers have the ability to hide or ignore their mistakes in a non-market way, making those mistakes so long-lasting that they border on immortality.
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