To err or not to err?

What do we think or feel when we think of errors? Perhaps it reminds you of an error in judgment we made in our lives? Maybe a mistake you made on a test that kept you from a perfect score? Perhaps a misjudgment of timing that led to an erroneous stroke in a game of tennis? It likely led you down regret lane in your memory.

There are different kinds of errors when it comes to judgments. Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off-target(preference for people of your gender, religion, caste, age, etc.). We are all familiar with Bias as we encounter it in the form of racism, sexism, and ableism, and I have written about sunk-cost Bias in my earlier blog post. When these errors are left unchecked, they become systemic errors like the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, systemic racism, and corporate fraud.

Other judgments are noisy, as people expected to agree, and end up at very different points around the target.
Suppose that someone has been convicted of a crime — shoplifting, possession of heroin, assault, or armed robbery. What is the sentence likely to be? The answer should not depend on the particular judge to whom the case happens to be assigned, whether it is hot or cold outside, or whether a local sports team won the day before. It would be outrageous if three similar people, convicted of the same crime, received radically different penalties: probation for one, two years in jail for another, and ten years in prison for another. And yet that outrage can be found in many nations — not only in the distant past but also today.
A study conducted in 1981 involved 208 federal judges who were exposed to the same sixteen hypothetical cases. Its central findings were stunning: In only 3 of the 16 cases, was there a unanimous agreement to impose a prison term. Even where most judges agreed that a prison term was appropriate, there was a substantial variation in the lengths of prison terms recommended. In one fraud case in which the mean prison term was 8.5 years, the most extended term was life in prison. In another case, the mean prison term was 1.1 years, yet the most extended prison term recommended was 15 years.
Even something as irrelevant as the outside temperature can influence judges. A review of 207,000 immigration court decisions over four years found a significant effect of daily temperature variations: people are less likely to get asylum when it is hot outside. If you suffer political persecution in your home country and want asylum elsewhere, you should hope and maybe even pray that your hearing falls on a cool day. For example, judges have been found more likely to grant parole at the beginning of the day or after a food break than immediately before. If judges are hungry, they are tougher.

Similarly, medicine is noisy. Faced with the same patient, different doctors judge whether patients have skin cancer, breast cancer, heart disease, tuberculosis, pneumonia, depression, and a host of other conditions. Forecasts are noisy. Personnel decisions are noisy.

One of my favorite and bizarre types of error involves electronics. The blue screen of death could be caused because of this. Single Event Errors(SEE) is a change in the state caused by one single ionizing particle(mostly from cosmic rays) striking a sensitive node in a chip. In 2003 in Schaerbeek, Belgium, a SEE was responsible for giving a candidate in an election an extra 4,096 votes. 4096 happens to 2¹², hence the bit flipping occurring at the 12th digit, leading to more votes through the electronic voting machine. A single-event upset in the flight computers of this Airbus A330 during Qantas Flight 72 on 7 October 2008 is suspected of having resulted in an aircraft upset that nearly ended in a crash after the computers experienced several malfunctions.

Having said all this, do we need to eradicate errors from our lives? Is it even desirable to do so?

Evolution presupposes errors. Mutations in DNA(Say by UV rays) cause evolution. And without error, evolution would stagnate. Most of the time, these errors lead to disastrous outcomes or have no effect whatsoever. But now and then, a mutation opens up a new door. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s not enough to say “to err is human.” Error is what made humans possible in the first place.

The idea of errors does not sit comfortably with success in the business world. Toyota’s lean manufacturing and six sigma have an error rate of less than 3.4 in a million. Perfection is a quality we often strive for, and we often equate that with not making errors. But efficiency comes at the cost of agility, and upcoming startups often topple the once giants. Innovation requires wandering.

“Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient — but it’s also not random. It’s guided — by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries — the ‘nonlinear’ ones — are highly likely to require wandering.” Jeff Bezos

Before he had left on vacation in 1928, Alexander Fleming had piled a number of his Petri dishes to the side of the bench so that his colleague could use his workbench while he was away. While he had been away, a mold had grown on the dish. That in itself was not strange. However, this particular mold seemed to have killed the bacteria growing in the dish. Fleming realized that this mold had potential. This led to the development of Penicillin. Penicillin also treated diphtheria, gangrene, pneumonia, syphilis, and tuberculosis. Errors led to the development of antibiotics. Xrays and microwave ovens have a similar story.

In summary, in answer to To err or not to err, I think these few lines captured by Piet Hein encapsulate it well:

The road to wisdom? Well, it’s plain
And simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again,
but less
and less
and less.