Keynes operated on a higher plane than most of us, but that process—try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again—is fundamental to how all of us learn, almost from the moment we are born. ... The mother could skip the drama by putting her baby on her back, or in a chair, but she knows that when her baby flops she learns that she shouldn’t tilt her head that far and the next time she sits up she will be a little steadier. The baby will still have to practice this new skill to make it reliable, then habitual, but the initial flop delivers the conceptual breakthrough.
Mastery Ravine
Getting worse precedes getting better in skill.
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The first is called the "learning plateau." During a series of days in which a performance, such as typewriting or receiving the Morse code telegraphically, is practiced, the curve shows improvement both in speed and in the reduction of errors. Then suddenly the curve flattens out. For some days, the learner cannot make any advances. His hard work seems to yield no substantial effects either in speed or accuracy. The rule that every bit of practice makes a little more perfect appears to break down. Then, just as suddenly, the learners gets off the plateau and starts to climb again.
Falling into the ravine. It's easy to say, "Look for a better strategy," but it's not so easy to do. You may have an idea that playing three balls would be better, but perhaps if you try for that setup, you'll fall into one of the machine's traps. To find a better pinball strategy, you have to test your idea in practice, but to do that, you have to deviate from the strategy you already know how to do so well. Figure 4.2 shows my average progress on the Black Knight, but Figure 4.3 shows the same progress without averaging out some of the details. In front of each plateau is a ravine. Whenever I tried to improve, I didn't experience a great leap forward until I had experienced a small stumble backward.
It is a painful process to fight one’s way out of deep mental grooves. It’s like digging yourself out of a trench. But there is a natural and more childlike method. A child doesn’t dig his way out of his old grooves; he simply starts new ones!
The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. ... That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.”
This is the essence of learning. The lecturer says something, and it goes in one ear and out the other. The factoid is repeated; same thing. It’s repeated enough times and—aha!—the lightbulb goes on and suddenly you get it.
No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art. ... The engineer always believes he is trying something without error, but the truth of the matter is that each new structure can be a new trial. ... Such is the nature not only of science and engineering, but of all human endeavors.
But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality).