Starship Asterisk*

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.

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

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

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