On Heuristics: Trial and Error in Technology

"Every detection of what is false directs us towards what is true: every trial exhausts some tempting form of error. Not only so; but scarcely any attempt is entirely a failure; scarcely any theory, the result of steady thought, is altogether false; no tempting form of error is without some latent charm derived from truth." (William Whewell, "Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy in England", 1852)

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." (Franklin D Roosevelt, Address at Oglethorpe University, 1932)

"Whatever humans have learned had to be learned as a consequence only of trial and error experience. Humans have learned only through mistakes." (R Buckminster Fuller, "Intuition", 1983)

"The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, and tossed out if necessary, with more new ideas brought in - a trial and error system." (Richard P Feynman, "What Do You Care What Other People Think". Book by Richard P. Feynman, 1988)

"Reinventing the wheel and getting it wrong is more valuable than nailing it first time. There are lessons learned from trial and error that have an emotional component to them that reading a technical book alone just cannot deliver!" (Jason P Sage, [in Kevlin Henney’s "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know", 2010])

"Technology is the result of antifragility, exploited by risk-takers in the form of tinkering and trial and error, with nerd-driven design confined to the backstage." (Nassim N Taleb, "Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder", 2012)

"Another crowning achievement of deep learning is its extension to the domain of reinforcement learning. In the context of reinforcement learning, an autonomous agent must learn to perform a task by trial and error, without any guidance from the human operator." (Ian Goodfellow et al, "Deep Learning", 2015)