Learning and making mistakes

Articles with quotes, then links toward the bottom.

How to learn from your mistakes by Scott Berkun Learning from mistakes requires three things:

1. Putting yourself in situations where you can make interesting mistakes
2. Having the self-confidence to admit to them
3. Being courageous about making changes

Errors vs Bugs and the End of Stupidity

You can't really describe the accuracy of a buggy program by the percent of questions it gets right; if you ask it to do something different, it could suddenly go from 99% right to 0% right.  You can only define its behavior by isolating what the bug does.

Your comfort zone is overrated by Faruk Ateş on The Pastry Box

In the past, a younger me no doubt would’ve reacted with angry defensiveness to some of these experiences. Nowadays, I am armed with the above two rules, so I let myself be uncomfortable about my mistake. I then asked for an alternative that wasn’t ableist. I accepted it and thanked my critic for keeping me sharp.

Kids who spot bullshit, and the adults who get upset about it

People wring their hands over how to make science relevant and accessible, but newspapers hand us one answer on a plate every week, with the barrage of claims on what’s good for you or bad for you: it’s evidence based medicine. If every school taught the basics – randomised trials, blinding, cohort studies, and why systematic reviews are better than cherrypicking your evidence – it would help everyone navigate the world, and learn some of the most important ideas in the whole of science.

The rest of the iceberg

I once attended a workshop where culture was defined as the “collective programming of the mind” that distinguishes one group of people from another.

This article also includes what the author calls the Cultural Iceberg - the tip of the iceberg being the outward trappings of our cultures, and everything below the water being the true bits of culture that occur.

Additional Resources

• A work in progress by Georgy Cohen on The Pastry Box
• Mount Stupid - by Zach Weiner on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal