Monday 16 June 2003

Pic of the day: Of course, a more ideal course of action is to avoid places where mistakes usually happen ... (Illustration picture from The Sims Superstar.)

Learn from mistakes?

Today I picked up a few American comics from the local dealer. As usual he was eager to discuss philosophy with me. He is actually more a hippie than a nerd; he must be even older than me, but he seems to not have sustained much damage from the 60es. Today he ventured to convince me that people don't learn from their mistakes. He argued the point quite well, too.

First off, as we all know, you can learn without making mistakes. In fact, it is often more efficient. If you want to drive to some place you have never been, looking at a map and following signs is way more efficient than driving in wrong directions until you find the right one. And you are likely to remember the right way better too ... although of course you have much less knowledge of all the wrong ways you could have taken.

Second, you can make mistakes without learning. In fact, insisted my friendly book pusher, it is the same people who make the same sort of mistakes over and over again. Criminals, once let out, hurry to commit a new crime. People who forget to pay their bills are the same who forgot to pay their bills last year, if not last month. And the people whose cars bump into nearby objects are the same who just got the car straighted out from last time they bumped into something.

So, yes: You can make mistakes and you can learn. But there is not necessarily a connection between them. If you stop making a certain type of mistake, it is because you have changed, you have made a decision, you have grown more mature. If you could have postponed making the mistake in the first place until you were more mature, you need not ever have made it.

***

I think the man has some points, but that his view is too black and white. (Or, to twist a saying: There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who think in binary and those who don't.) I agree that there are people who habitually learn without making mistakes, and people who habitually make mistakes without learning. There are even people who make mistakes because they are still practicing, but who learn from practicing, not from the mistakes. In fact, it could be argued that you learn better from doing something right: It seems obviously more useful for a banker to really really know the genuine bank notes than to try to learn to recognize every fake dollar bill out there.

But there are times when a mistake actually help learning. This is usually when that mistake shatters an illusion. And this, I believe, is what the old aphorism refers to. We have perhaps been led to believe that certain actions will make us happy. But when we do these things, we realize that we have been fooled. We turn away from them. Like a child that has burned its fingers is not likely to play with the pretty fire again for quite a while.

But how often does this happen? It may happen when the experience is particularly painful or disgusting. (Indeed, the examples that come to mind are such that they would all force me to change the color code of the entry.) Some people are particularly sensitive and may recoil from less. But on the other hand many, I would say most, do not easily learn. They do not necessarily like what they experience, but they cannot see any alternative. They believe in advertising, in novels, in friends' talk. They decide that it must be something wrong with them since they do not enjoy it, and so they try again, and accumulate unhappiness in their lives.

So in conclusion, yes, I think it is possible to learn from our mistakes. But it is not an automatic thing, perhaps not even very common, except for the most basic mistakes we make while we are children. From then on, other means of learning grow more important. And a good thing too. Learning from other's mistakes is, after all, much more amusing ...