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The Scope of Your Failure

We all make tons of mistakes. Understanding the scope of our error, however, doesn’t require a soul-searching admission of imperfection. Instead, we just need a little arithmetic.

Before we get a more detailed study of failure, however, let’s talk about another problem for the ages: how many fish are there in the sea? This is the kind of question that is extremely impractical to answer, mostly because the sea is very large and fluid and the size of private research funds devoted to such analysis is quite small. So how do you figure it out?

Photo © pacificaqua.org

One way is to use the Lincoln-Petersen method, which consists of three simple steps:

1. Capture some fish
2. Mark all of those fish, and release them
3. Capture some more fish, noting if any are being recaptured.

If you think about it for a moment, this approach gives a powerful indicator of the total size of the population. For example, if all of the recaptured fish are marked, you have pretty much accounted for all the aquatic life. But if you don’t find a single marked fish, then the total number of fish must be far bigger than the amount you have been catching.

The capture-mark-recapture strategy is fantastic because it uses two independent assessments: the first capture and the second capture. It’s not only used by marine biologists, but scientists working with all kinds of plants and animals. It’s even a great tool for studying the spread of epidemics, the movement of money through a financial system, or the spread of an oil spill.

But anyway, back to making mistakes. How can we use Lincoln-Petersen for figuring out how we screwed up? Consider something prone to having lots errors, like a book on failure. What’s the best way to determine the number of typos in a manuscript?

That’s easy: have two seperate copyeditors review the same version of the document, and see which errors they find. Mistakes that both reviewers uncover are like marked fish. They’ve been captured and recaptured. Screwups that only one reviewer finds are more serious. If something escapes the nets of two distinct professionals, more work remains to be done.

We must fail in order to succeed. We would never think the ocean was empty after an unsuccessful fishing expedition, but we might think we’ve found all the errors in our work after one focused session of careful review. Instead, we should expect to fail. We should independent sources to look for errors and use this data to decide what we need to do next. Failure is the secret to success!

For some fascinating background, see the Bit Player blog.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.