Evidence of Impossibility

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The Pessimists Archive recently wrote,

In 1496 Leonardo Da Vinci did a failed flight experiment. 405 years later (1901) Wilbur Wright said “Not within a thousand years would man ever fly” after a failed flight test. In 1903 the New York Times said it would take 1 million to 10 million years.

9-weeks later [the Wright brothers achieved flight].

The New York Times was drawing on 100s of years of evidence of impossibility (what Safi Bahcall calls “false fails”). Every path to a futuristic end is littered with many failed means. The closer you get to a breakthrough, the more evidence of impossibility.

Safi Bahcall - author of Loonshots - refers to this as a “false fail,” which he defines as “A failure due to a flaw in an experiment, rather than a fundamental flaw in the idea.”

Think back on the last few years—what innovations did your school try but fail at? [1] Did anyone in your community characterize those failures as “evidence of impossibility”?

The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s often considered a crazy idea. And the longer you’ve been working on it, the more evidence you have accumulated that it won’t work.

But there is a big difference between a crazy idea and a poorly designed experiment.

In a post-COVID world, schools that combine crazy ideas with cultures of experimentation will thrive.

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[1] If your answer to this is “Nothing” or “Not many” then you are not running enough innovation experiments.

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