If you want to be right, be wrong

The recent death of curmudgeonly old soak and songwriting genius Gerry Rafferty brought out a thousand Baker Street tributes. For my money, though, his best song was Get It Right Next Time, a funky number and a surprisingly upbeat one for an artist whose vision was often rather bleak:

“Life is a liar, yeah, life is a cheat,
It’ll lead you on and pull the ground from underneath your feet,
No use complaining, don’t you worry, don’t you whine,
Cos if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time, next time.”

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading an entertaining ‘popular science’ book, Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz, the main thrust of which is that human beings fail much of the time and that it would be better if we accommodated our failures rather than denied them, covered them up or pretended that we could eliminate them. This appears perhaps obvious and rather uninteresting, but there’s a suggestion of a deeper truth here that challenges a lot of apparently commonsense ideas about learning and doing.

From almost the moment we’re born, we get things very wrong – failing to recognise objects, failing to manipulate objects, failing to understand speech, failing to speak, failing to walk and so on. However, during all these failures we’re doing more learning than we will do for the rest of our lives, and we come out of it (barring disability) being able to walk, talk and work out pretty much how stuff around us looks and feels.

What’s more, we do all this without large amounts of external help – seeing and hearing people around us, feeling objects and trying out imitative movements and sounds seem to be sufficient, with a decent smattering of feedback. Some ‘pushy’ parents like to think they can intervene to make their child ‘better’ at these basic abilities, but I’m reminded of the mother in the park painstakingly pointing out to her tiny child that daffodils are yellow: “Look – like your jumper is yellow… and this scarf is yellow… yell-ow!” Well-meaning, I’m sure, but you’ll look around in vain for all those older children who’ve failed to grasp what ‘yellow’ is because of a lack of this sort of intervention. In all likelihood, the child works it out by observation of what others refer to when they use the word ‘yellow’, and then uses it on other occasions to see if it gets a positive or negative response. Trial and error – not, you’ll notice, trial and success.

An acceptance of error, though, seems to be anathema to much of the modern education system, particularly at school level, and I suspect that one crucial reason for this is that modern schooling developed hand-in-hand with the needs and drives of an industrial society of mass production, transportation, standardisation and so on. Being right is critical for advanced technological societies – you don’t want a safety officer in a nuclear power plant hitting the wrong button in the manner of Homer Simpson (right). And one slip in a line of code can turn a perfectly decent piece of software into meaningless gobbledygook. The worlds of complex technology, manufacture and modern commerce come down very hard on those who make errors. As Being Wrong shows, though, human error always wins out, whether through bad habits, sloppiness, over-confidence, laziness, greed or just, well, getting it wrong. There are no human systems which are infallible to error – SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F*cked Up) as they said in the Second World War. Paul Ormerod’s entertaining Why Most Things Fail explains this brilliantly.

In a less technologically advanced world, getting it precisely right all the time wasn’t critical. Sowing seeds? Just use a handful at a time. And how much is a handful exactly? No idea. In such a world, people learned to do things by rules of thumb, by informed guesswork, by watching those who knew what they were doing and by the everyday experience of getting things wrong in order to get them right next time. There were almost no systems of human activity then which would have been fatally harmed by ordinary screw-ups – in other words, they were more resilient.

Modern schooling is good at impressing upon children not to get things wrong, but this is frequently at the expense of learning. In a world of ticks and crosses, exam grades, marks, inspections, league tables and testing, it’s all about getting it right. And children learn how to cheat, to commit facts to short-term memory, to second-guess teachers and to be non-committal when they’re not sure – all in order not to be wrong. In that environment, experimentation and trial and error are unwelcome. The view from the front of the class is similar – teachers can also be inclined to cheat on behalf of their pupils and avoid anything risky, off-topic or unlikely to contribute to the maximisation of those all-powerful grades. I don’t blame them as individuals any more than I would blame the children – they’re simply doing what the system demands and no amount of tinkering with the curriculum is going to change that.

The great educational thinker John Holt included a pertinent observation in his groundbreaking 1964 book How Children Fail. As a teacher, he indulged his class in one of those “I’m thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000” guessing games to see if they could work out strategies to get the answer as quickly as possible by asking, “Is it greater than 5,000?” and so on, thus narrowing down the possibilities:
“They… cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of the miseducation in which “right answers” are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, “Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?” and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case.”

A culture of avoiding error has other implications. It’s commonly believed that adults are worse than children at learning foreign languages because of habituated ‘neural pathways’ or some similar biological phenomenon, but I wonder if one factor is that adults are held back by their learned avoidance of error. The grown-up way is to want to speak a foreign language absolutely correctly, otherwise we’ll look stupid or won’t be understood. But only by jumping in at the deep end and getting things wrong are we likely to engage in the sorts of conversations that make language learning quicker and easier. I know for sure that my rusty conversational French is better after I’ve had one too many glasses of the local plonk and my inhibitions are, shall we say, diminished.

Children, especially when they’re not in school, are far more willing than most adults to jump in and get things wrong – when I walk along the Thames and see teenagers skateboarding at London’s Southbank (left), what strikes me is how they will try a trick, fall over, get up and try it again, all in front of their peers. Despite (or perhaps because of) the lack of an ‘authoritative’ adult figure being present, there’s no name-calling, teasing or jeering, because they’ve all learned that to get better at skateboarding means getting it wrong a lot of the time and watching your fellow skateboarders to see how they do things, both good and bad.

Similarly, if I get a new gadget, I’ll patiently read through the instructions before turning it on and progressing steadily through the initial set-up stages. My children, by contrast, will just turn it on, start pressing things and find out what does what. And I’m now convinced that their way of learning in this environment is quicker and better than mine, but I feel a very strong pull not to get it wrong.

The irony of a school system that shuns error is that getting it wrong is a cornerstone of the modern scientific method, in which a theorist sets up a testable hypothesis on a wall and his or her fellow scientists try to knock it off by throwing big ugly experiments at it. Scientific knowledge advances by proving things wrong, not by proving them right. We treat those theories that manage to stay on the wall as knowledge, but we don’t rule out the possibility of someone knocking them off. In this environment, scientists get used to getting things wrong – or at least they should do. Alas, the world of science is also infected by ‘get it right at all costs’, meaning that work-a-day scientists can cheat, lie and fiddle as skilfully as the most canny schoolchild. It’s all about funding, preferment and tenure, you see, and it’s a rare funding committee that will tolerate some geek in a lab coat saying, “Well, we spent your first five million pounds – and, hey, it turns out we were completely wrong, which is interesting for the following reasons…” The great innovator, technologist and merciless self-promoter Thomas Edison summed up the purist point of view when he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” He had, however, accumulated enough wealth to fund those 10,000 dud experiments.

So if science acknowledges the importance of error in the process of accumulating knowledge, the arts positively embrace it. From a technical point of view, you can’t achieve excellence at playing an instrument or writing fiction, for instance, without hours and hours of practice (10,000 hours, according to Malcolm Gladwell) – which means getting it wrong time and time again. But from a certain creative perspective, even a flubbed note is not necessarily to be grimaced at. Miles Davis (below), one of the greatest musical innovators, once enigmatically said, “Don’t be afraid of mistakes – there aren’t any.” At the outer edges of artistic innovation, exploration and discovery, he’s right. My musical hero Neil Young has pushed the boundaries many times in his career and Pitchfork commented on his sprawling Archives project thus:
“Neil Young is an odd sort of perfectionist, favoring a raw immediacy in his recordings that often means leaving the mistakes in for purity’s sake, but he’s obsessed with making sure those mistakes are mixed and mastered to sometimes unattainable standards of fidelity.”

I think Neil would like that and he’s not alone – the highbrow and lowbrow arts seem to agree about the crucial role error plays in artistic endeavour. James Joyce suggested that “Mistakes are the portals of discovery,” while Rihanna has a shoulder tattoo which reads, “Never a failure, always a lesson.” (Or was it Joyce who had the tattoo…?). When phrased like this, the furthest reaches of scientific and artistic creative discovery sound remarkably similar – places where all sorts of ideas and dreams get tossed around and examined, no matter how absurd or ‘wrong’ they might appear.

Apart from school giving us the unhelpful lesson that being right all the time is essential, are there other forces which make us see error as so distasteful? One simple observation is that we are surrounded by objects and systems, both natural and artificial, that have – so far – succeeded. By definition, we don’t see the myriad failures, botched jobs and balls-ups that fell by the wayside, but which were crucial to the development of those things that did go right. So superficially the world looks almost ‘perfect’, but then we’re not seeing the whole messy picture. While rummaging around the web for some stuff to do with my namesake St Aldhelm, I came across this unintentionally amusing comment concerning the glorious cathedrals of medieval England:
“At 404 feet, Salisbury Cathedral (left) has the tallest medieval tower in England today, but this was not always so. It is said that Malmesbury Abbey’s tower was taller, though it fell down in 1500. Lincoln’s 525-foot tower was raised in 1307 and was blown down in 1548, thirteen years before the spire on Old St Paul’s in London suffered the same fate. So Salisbury’s spire is remarkable not only that it was built – but that its still stands today, some 700 years later.”

(As an aside, that’s remarkably similar to Michael Palin’s bluff Yorkshire lord in Monty Python And The Holy Grail: “When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, lad – the strongest castle in all of England.”).

The fate of medieval England’s cathedrals is a neat example of the world looking perfect but being built literally upon the rubble of many unseeable errors. Similarly with biology – we don’t see evolution’s millions upon millions of failures that have allowed the (temporary) successes to succeed. Evolution doesn’t ‘create’ better and better life forms – it just chucks around billions of chunks of DNA and amino acids, the vast majority of which are utterly unviable. But that’s the process that has given us the extraordinary beauty and ‘order’ of nature.

An insistence on getting it right stops us exploring new ways of doing things, of learning and of being versatile and flexible in the face of change. So next time you screw up, just remember you’re being normal. This might seem an unlikely place to quote chirpy actor and Carry On star Jim Dale, but he spoke a truth when he remarked, “You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.” Here’s to getting it wrong – unless, of course, you’re the safety officer of a nuclear power plant…