Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seems like
high-minded goals, but they are fundamentally misguided. Take something like
the Golden Fleece awards which were established in 1975 to call attention to
government-funded projects that were particularly egregious wastes of money.
(Among the winners were things like an $84,000 study on love commissioned by
the National Science Foundation, and a $3,000 Department of Defense study that
examined whether people in the military should carry umbrellas.) While such
scrutiny may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it had a chilling effect
on research. No one wanted to “win” a Golden Fleece Award because, under the
guise of avoiding waste, its organizers had inadvertently made it dangerous and
embarrassing for everyone to make mistakes.
The truth is, if you fund thousands of research projects
every year, some will have obvious, measurable, positive impacts, and others
will go nowhere. We aren’t very good at predicting the future – that’s a given –
and yet the Golden Fleece Awards tacitly implied that researches should know
before they do their research whether or not the results of that research would
have value. Failure was being used as a weapon, rather than as an agent of
learning. And that had fallout: The fact that failing could earn you a very
public flogging distorted the way researchers chose projects. The politics of
failure, then, impeded our progress.
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