What if... learning to fail?
What if we treated failure as a subject to learn about?
We might discover, as Wang et al. did in “Quantifying the dynamics of failure across science, startups and security,” that:
“At one extreme, the very worst learners incorporate zero information from their previous tries, starting from scratch on every component every time. At the other extreme are perfect learners, who consider all of their past failures with each fresh attempt. Most people are somewhere between these two extremes.
“Wang compares this threshold to the transition between water and ice. ‘Imagine I go from -5 to -4 degrees Celsius,’ he explains. ‘Nothing happens. The ice stays as ice.’ But the moment the temperature hits a particular point, it begins to melt.
“Similarly, if someone’s learning ability is below the threshold, it’s as if they were learning nothing at all. They may improve slightly over time, Wang says, but they will never retain enough good components to produce a full-throated success.”
Uncertainty involves failures.
But we can reduce uncertainty over time by studying those failures and “failing better” with each subsequent attempt.
In school, it’s not possible to fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, and then succeed. Grades just don’t work that way.
Maybe one path forward is to grade students on how much they learn from their failures.
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Each Wednesday we share a “what if” scenario. Consider it a provocation rather than a suggestion.
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