Comment by qqxufo

Failure doesn’t teach by default; it teaches only when you design for it. Three dials matter: cost, frequency, and observability.

Make failures cheap and reversible. Shrink the scope until a rollback is boring. If a failure requires a committee or a quarter to undo, you’ll avoid the very experiments you need.

Raise frequency deliberately. Schedule “bad ideas hour” or small probes so you don’t wait for organic disasters to learn.

Max out observability. Before you try, write the few assumptions the test could falsify. Log what would have changed your mind earlier (counterfactual triggers), not just what happened.

Two practices that compound:

1. Pre-mortem → post-mortem symmetry. In the pre-mortem, list concrete failure modes and “tripwires”; in the post-mortem, only record items that map back to one of those or add a new class with a guardrail/checklist—not “be more careful.”

2. Separate noise from surprise. Tag outcomes as variance vs. model error. Punishing variance breeds risk aversion; fixing model error improves judgment.

Hard problems rarely yield to heroics; they yield to lots of small, instrumented failures.