The benefits of failing fast
In his book Intuition pumps and other thinking toolsDaniel Dennett’s first intuition pump is to extol the virtues of making mistakes courageously. He describes it like this:
Sometimes you don’t just want risk Make mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to have something clear and detailed to correct. Making mistakes is the key to progress. Of course, there are times when it is really important not to make mistakes – ask any surgeon or pilot. But it is less widely recognised that there are also times when making mistakes is the only way to get ahead. Many of the students who arrive at very competitive universities pride themselves on not making mistakes – after all, that is why they have got so much further than their classmates, or at least that is what they have been led to believe. I often find that I have to encourage them to maintain the habit Making mistakes is the best way to learn. They get writer’s block and waste hours pacing back and forth in despair at the starting line. “Speak it out!” I tell them. Then they have something on paper to work with.
This reminds me of the old joke about how to go about carving an elephant out of granite. The ironic advice is to just start with a big piece of granite and then chip away at all the bits that don’t look like an elephant. Dennett takes a similar approach – throw the unformed granite block of your mind out there and let all the bits that don’t work chip away at you while you find and correct your mistakes.
Dennett cheerfully describes himself as “an experienced mistake-maker. I’ve made some mistakes and hope to make many more.” But there is one key to being a good mistake-maker, Dennett says, and that is the willingness, even the eagerness, to pick apart your own ideas:
The most important trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – especially from yourself. Instead of turning away and denying when you make a mistake, become a connoisseur of your own mistakes and go over them in your head as if they were works of art, which in a way they are… The trick is to use the special details of the mess you made so that your next attempt is shaped by it and not just another blind shot in the dark.
Mistakes are good if they are quickly recognized, corrected and learned from. I firmly believe that most new ideas are terrible – and this applies regardless of whether the new ideas come from private market participants or from policymakers at the government level. The crucial difference is that in markets, mistakes can be quickly identified and corrected, whereas this is not the case for mistakes made by policymakers.
For example, in my post explaining that most new ideas are terrible, I used the example of an upcoming tech product called R1 Rabbit and explained why I thought it would be a flop. Since I wrote that, the product has been released and the consensus that has developed since then is that the product is indeed pretty awfulAnother product I could have mentioned in this post is the Humane AI Pin, which seemed even more immature to me. This one also seems become the general consensus, and currently Humane sees the product returned faster than they can sell it.
I suspect that both companies won’t be around for long. A lot of time, effort and money went into building the companies and making the products. And some people ended up spending money to get a product that turned out to be half-baked. That’s certainly not ideal – but the correction is happening quickly.
Compare this with another bad policy I recently highlightedwhen “King William III introduced a tax on windows, believing that houses and buildings with many windows were likely to be owned by the rich and thus this would serve as a means of taxing the rich.” But, as Scott Hodges’ book Taxocracy“The tax ‘led to particularly miserable conditions for the urban poor, as landlords blocked up windows and built tenements without adequate lighting and ventilation.’ Some buildings were built without windows on some floors, which led to the ‘spread of numerous diseases such as dysentery, gangrene and typhus.'”
This too was far from ideal. It led to people living in unnecessarily miserable, dark and stuffy conditions. Diseases spread more quickly, costing many lives and causing significant pain and suffering to those who survived. This problem was also eventually resolved – the tax was eventually abolished. But the tax and its negative effects persisted. 150 years before that happened.
Entrepreneurs are not necessarily smarter than government politicians, nor do they have the ability to come up with better ideas. But when entrepreneurs make mistakes, they don’t stick around for long. Politicians can make mistakes that cause illness, suffering, and death, and those policies can last for several lifetimes before the mistake is corrected.
Arnold Kling often used the mantra, “Markets fail. Use markets.” Yes – because when markets fail, they fail quickly and correct themselves quickly. Dennett advises his students to beware of hiding their mistakes, especially from themselves. But government policymakers have the ability to hide or overlook their mistakes in ways that are simply not possible in the market, making those mistakes so long-lasting that they border on immortality.
