Epiphany - the benefits of failure

dongfeng

731 Posts

July 09 2012 03:01 GMT

" An art teacher did an experiment with his ceramic class. He divided the class into two. The left side was graded purely on the quantity of ceramics they produced and the right side purely on the quality. For the left side, the art teacher mentioned that he would bring in a set of bathroom scales and if 25kg of pots was created, he would award them an A, 20kg a B and so on.

The side graded on quality merely needed to produce one pot, albeit a perfect one.

What was astonishing was that the quantity side were producing by far the better quality pots. It seems that while the quantity group was busy churning out piles of pots and learning from their mistakes, the quality group was using a lot of time to develop grandiose theories and had not much to show for it."

John C Maxwell

I hope you guys get as much out of this story as I did. I have always been the "quality" person, using "minimal" effort but a lot of time is wasted on theorising the best possible solution, when in actual fact it may be more efficient to just try and fail, try again etc.

DRTnOOber

New Zealand476 Posts

July 09 2012 03:06 GMT

Nice quote

On the flip side of the same idea though...

I have a friend who plays Starcraft 2. He plays thousands of games, and is stuck in Gold league. Although he's doing things over and over again he isn't consciously assessing his replays or what he needs to work on, and so he doesn't improve. He used to be able to beat me, and after I did maybe two dozen ladder matches he didn't stand a chance against me simply because I was very consciously working on my weak areas.

So there's trial and error, and making mistakes, but you can significantly reduce the time required to get good at something by being smart about how you approach it.

obesechicken13

United States10467 Posts

July 09 2012 03:21 GMT

I find the opposite true of computer programs. There's a lot of trial and error needed to learn the material, but taking some time out to really think about some buggy code beats hours of hammering away trying to figure out the problem. 20 minutes with the debugger beats two hours of print statements.

This really sucks when you're working with a language that doesn't have good debuggers (PHP up until maybe this year, Octave, R).

Perhaps what I'm saying is that trial and error is a great way to learn new material, but it perhaps isn't the best way to actually approach improving for veterans. There's more to be gained from trial and error for people beginning to make pottery because the students learned a lot of muscle memory, and everything they learned was simple.

dongfeng

731 Posts

July 09 2012 03:33 GMT

good points - i think that a combination of a "smart" approach to assessing the failures gained through repeated application is key then

docvoc

United States5491 Posts

July 09 2012 03:58 GMT

I feel like that is a general rule, the more expereince, the better

DRTnOOber

New Zealand476 Posts

July 09 2012 09:36 GMT

On July 09 2012 12:21 obesechicken13 wrote:
I find the opposite true of computer programs. There's a lot of trial and error needed to learn the material, but taking some time out to really think about some buggy code beats hours of hammering away trying to figure out the problem. 20 minutes with the debugger beats two hours of print statements.

This really sucks when you're working with a language that doesn't have good debuggers (PHP up until maybe this year, Octave, R).

Perhaps what I'm saying is that trial and error is a great way to learn new material, but it perhaps isn't the best way to actually approach improving for veterans. There's more to be gained from trial and error for people beginning to make pottery because the students learned a lot of muscle memory, and everything they learned was simple.

I don't have a good Perl debugger at work... and you know Perl, right? It's so easy to break your entire program with a single wrong key stroke... Print statements galore. My colleague has Komodo which has a Perl debugger but I don't get a licence

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