Error Correction
Karl Popper says “all of life is problem solving” I say “all of life is error correction” [1].
Start
Do all successful companies have a beautiful beginning? Do all rosy relationships have a rosy start? Do all record selling products have phenomenal opening sales?
Of course the answer to all the above is a resounding no. Jim Collins’ good to great details several companies that had horrible beginnings and later became leaders in their respective fields. Many rosy relationships have their origin in a not so rosy initial meeting. The seeming ubiquitous Coca-Cola never really looked like it from the start. Neither does a great start or beginning for a company, relationship or product guarantee a great end.
So that if a great start does not guarantee a great end, and an ugly start does not guarantee an ugly end, what then does determine the culminating story/results of projects, companies or personal relationships we embark on?
Error Correction
In Plan I wrote: “The first step every scientist makes on the way towards propounding a theory is to make a guess – hypothesis, and then set out to disprove that guess – deduction. Along the way, the initial guess either gets affirmed, modified or discarded. Hence, science proceeds by error correction…”.
It turns out that the same is true of life in general, in that you can begin from any point in life, either good or bad, and by reason of error correction adjust your ideas, beliefs or activities as you receive feedback from your previous ideas, beliefs and activities.
So that at the start, a coin flip is sufficient to decide how, where or when to begin, but should you have a chance of a successful end, subsequent decisions have to be made using outputs of previous decisions as inputs into your present decision making process. In other words, present decisions have to be outputs of the culmination of a reasoning process that takes into consideration present conditions and returns from previous decisions. This process is iterated until a successful point or formula that leads to success is hit.
So that by dint of the concept of error correction, we in undertaking projects, need not be overtly bothered (if bad) or overtly excited (if good) by the beginning of it, rather we can be rest assured in one thing, that no matter what comes, we always retain the right and ability to make changes - error correction.
Dogma
Charlie Munger: “The mind is a lot like the human egg, and the human egg has a shut-off device. When one sperm gets in, it shuts down so the next one can’t get in. the human mind has a big tendency of the same sort…”
Dogmatic individuals have ideas they hold onto for dear life and will not, irrespective of arguments or evidence to the contrary, change their mind. It is quite easy to recognize dogmatic individuals when engaged in religious discussions, but it is by no means restricted to religious individuals, it is a feature of the mind that can ‘affect’ anyone in or from any walk of life.
Dogmatic individuals seem to have forgotten that the ideas they are holding firmly onto have not always been in their mind, they might have benefited greatly from it at some point (which is why many get dogmatic), but they had to learn, read or hear it from someone or via a personal experience before they now hold onto it.
To be dogmatic is to implicitly believe your knowledge is infallible, and if that is true, then you are greater than God who in the scriptures on several occasions changed ‘his mind’ when the situation warranted it.
Thing is, the world is in a constant state of flux, no two moments in time are the same, they might seem similar, but the state of the world gets updated from moment to moment based on the input all the universal components that make it up put into it, this is one reason why adopting the error correcting attitude pays off, because this attitude predisposes you to change, when a significant change is necessary, dogmatic individuals are more likely to be left holding the bag than those with an error correcting attitude.
What then?
No one was born with ideas, do not be dogmatic, things that work today might not work tomorrow, that which has been from the foundation of the world might not be anymore, so that when conditions change, those with superpowers will not be those who are powerful today, rather it will be those who effectively make necessary adjustments to transition themselves into operating in the new reality. Error correction is a superpower.
Thank you for reading.