Notice how young kids learn to walk. Try, fail, try again, over and over until they get it right. On the other end of the continuum are politicians accusing each other of changing their minds. Dragging up statements from years ago to slap each other with a change in direction. When did they lose their ability to be proud of learning? When did voters start expecting politicians not to learn, recognize failure, and try something else? I don’t understand this. I once said I would never get married, I would never have kids. Now I’ve been married for 40 years and have a fabulous family. I learned much since my ignorant adolescent days. Living successfully with chronic illness requires trying, failing, getting up again and trying something else. Diagnosis depends on testing, trying a treatment, measuring its success or failure, and repeating the cycle until something works to decrease suffering. The tragedies are when trying never leads to a better life, or the team stops trying. Research faces a similar dilemma. Supposedly research tests hypotheses. One treatment or approach works better than another. Yet peer-reviewed journals publish articles that prove the hypothesis and doesn’t publish articles that disproves the hypothesis. What is this bias? I know that I have learned more from my mistakes than my successes. What if I couldn’t recognize a mistake or a failure and kept sticking with it? Thank God I can shift and try something else. I’m more skeptical when th change is degeneration of values. Less empathy, more fear, less generosity, more cruelty. I could appreciate more empathy, less fear, more generosity, less cruelty. Let’s honor rapid discovery of and learning from mistakes and courage to try something else. Let’s learn from those kids.
Learning from What Doesn’t Work
