Nassim Nicholas Taleb is up for a Nobel tomorrow. His ideas about tinkering resonate with me. (I actually wrote about this – The Power of an Aside Project). Here some of his quotes from his Forbes article – You Can’t Predict Who Will Change The World:
“Things, it turns out, are all too often discovered by accident–but we don’t see that when we look at history in our rear-view mirrors. The technologies that run the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used in the way intended by those who invented them. Even academics are starting to realize that a considerable component of medical discovery comes from the fringes, where people find what they are not exactly looking for. It is not just that hypertension drugs led to Viagra or that angiogenesis drugs led to the treatment of macular degeneration, but that even discoveries we claim come from research are themselves highly accidental. They are the result of undirected tinkering narrated after the fact, when it is dressed up as controlled research. The high rate of failure in scientific research should be sufficient to convince us of the lack of effectiveness in its design.
If the success rate of directed research is very low, though, it is true that the more we search, the more likely we are to find things “by accident,” outside the original plan. Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research. What academia seems more masterful at is public relations and fundraising.
This is good news–for some. Ignore what you were told by your college economics professor and consider the following puzzle. Whenever you hear a snotty European presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “unintellectual,” “uneducated,” and “poor in math,” because, unlike European schooling, American education is not based on equation drills and memorization.”
It’s easy to agree that trial and error beats deliberate planning. Strategically the really important question is when to abandon a trial and move to the next one. It’s easy to confuse a dip with an error. And there is always a dip. So the really important question everyone faces – should I persevere in a dip to see the other side of the mountain (and witness my competition drop from exhaustion) or I should move to another ridge.
Further reading: