Slate: Google Research Director Peter Norvig on Being Wrong

[RJN]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/thewro ... wrong.aspx

If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be. ...

I've been at both ends. My previous job was at NASA, where you really don't want your shuttles to blow up very often. So there they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their astronauts' lives. Here, we're kind of at the other end. Failure is always an option at Google.

[StarstruckKid]

Like jamming Net Neutrality?

[owlice]

If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments.

Or as it was put to me in my current job, "if everything you try works, you're not trying enough new stuff." Indeed!

Good interview; such a contrast between the way Norvig comes off in this compared to Venter in his interview!

[Beyond]

Now wait just a minute here, If everything you try works, isn't that called being successful??

[Chris Peterson]

Now wait just a minute here, If everything you try works, isn't that called being successful??

Perhaps. But it also means that you aren't pushing your abilities to their limits, which means you are less successful than you might be.

[owlice]

Now wait just a minute here, If everything you try works, isn't that called being successful??

No; that's called being careful. I can be safe and do things that I know will work, but if I want to be successful, if I want something better (or even, daresay, the best), I need to move beyond (heh!) that. The view from the valley is one thing; the view from the mountain another. Which is grander, encompasses more, lets us see further (even, perhaps, beyond)? The mountain. It is easier to stay in the valley and very pleasant to enjoy its beauties; it is not so easy to climb the mountain, but oh, the view! I have not always enjoyed my hikes to the summit, but I have always been glad I made the trek.