
Scientists use big data to understand what separates winners from losers - juniusfree
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/failure-found-to-be-an-essential-prerequisite-for-success/
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itronitron
>> The average number of failures for those who failed at least once before
success was 2.03 for NIH, 1.5 for startups and 3.90 for terrorist groups.

Regarding counter-terrorism, that would suggest that rather than more
surveillance we instead need better reporting of and responding to failed
terrorist incidents/attacks.

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perl4ever
This reminds me of (I think) Richard Feynman's comment about the Challenger,
to the effect that when the o-rings were eroded by 1/3 or whatever, they
called that a safety factor of 3, whereas they should have stopped and said
"wait, it wasn't supposed to do that at all, something is seriously wrong".

I'm not sure if it was him or someone else that pointed out when you do a
post-mortem on a disaster, you generally find a history of near-misses, but
people don't take near-misses as seriously as they should.

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typhonic
The book Apollo by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox shows a similar
concept. In the investigation after the fire in Apollo 1, they found many
possible near misses. But when each of those items did not lead to a failure,
they became accepted. They poor designs or installations were allowed to slide
and the accumulation of trouble spots kept increasing.

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o09rdk
I can't speak to venture funding or terrorism, but something seems really
misleading to me about the NIH grant applications model.

My sense is that a grant, like an academic paper, is often basically well-
received or not. So prior to going into it, if you're familiar with the
details of the particular grant, you can get some sense of interest or not.
The grant may have even been solicited in a certain sense by a program officer
or something, so it's quasi-invited.

Those grants that are quasi-invited, or well-received, will basically involve
polishing on subsequent revisions. Those that are totally unsolicited and not
well-received it doesn't matter how much polishing you do often, it will not
go anywhere.

I think where this becomes relevant to the paper is that this often has _very
little_ to do with the process of the grant revisions. It says little about
"how someone responds to failure", and everything about connections with the
grant agency, program officers, and luck. All that stuff that happens before
the grant is even submitted plays into it, and this paper kind of ignores
that.

You could say that it does speak to learning, in that you could ask "why
doesn't the other scientist adjust their strategy?" To which I'd say, there
are enormous pressures to submit anyway, and for someone who doesn't get good
mentoring about what to target, or what agency to target, or whose research
doesn't jive with the priorities of the division head at that time, or
whatever, they might just not get it, and it might easily be over the 5 year
period of the study.

Basically, at least with NIH grants I think this study is really misleading
and potentially harmful, because it kind of suggests failed applicants just
aren't learning, when I think what's really happening is that you have a
mixture of two groups, one of which can learn something, and the other of whom
it just doesn't matter if they learn or not, because the outcome has kind of
been preordained.

That is, the process they predict from is an indicator of which mixture class
the applicant belongs in, not the cause of the outcome.

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kekebo
Why was the original headline changed to the less descriptive subheadline of
the article?

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Dowwie
for those not yet aware of this title change tracker:
[https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/](https://hackernewstitles.netlify.com/)

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Fernicia
>the faster you fail, the better your chances of success, and the more time
between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again

This is confounded by the fact that the closer one is to success the more
frequent their attempts tend to be. The article doesn't indicate the research
took this into consideration.

e.g. Golfers takes shots more frequently the closer they are to a hole. But
telling a golfer from the start to take a series of frequent short shots is
bad advice.

~~~
keymon-o
Golf match should not be defined as a consecutive failures before a potential
success, but more of a set of strategic actions before a potential success.

But yes, it is not defined what they took into account. e.g. Calling the same
potential client hundred times in a row, can get you a restraining order only.

If qualitative input and output of an attempt would be taken in account,
quantity of an attempt would not really be that significant.

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fsloth
Well, I say... "move fast and break things" is now a scientifically validated
methodology.

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GoToRO
Move fast, break things and succeed is the valid methodology. Just move fast,
break things and put them in production, not so much.

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lifeisstillgood
This sounds like it has immediate practical applications at any incubator / VC
firm.

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reportgunner
So did the scientists succeed or fail ? I couldn't really tell from the
article and the paper, albeit I just skimmed it.

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keymon-o
If there were any conclusions made in the article, OP would probably make sure
to dramatically acknowledge the subjective idea in the title.

I guess we can only wait for the title "Here is 10 reasons why you are a
loser, Harry..."..

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sqba
There's hope yet for the Donald.

