Let there be more biographies of failures • Hacker News Board

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#81

Post by bumby » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

mdip wrote: post #44

zerealshadowban wrote: post #38

Henry Petroski has written several excellent essays and books about engineering failures, why it is inherent in engineering pursuits that there will be failures, why it is important to learn the right lessons from these failures, and why each new generation will forget past lessons. Start with: "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" (1985)

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

The engineer in me completely agrees with you, but I have a feeling the non-fiction books are geared to be as much entertainment as they are enlightening. If you want to forgo the former, look for case studies and mishap investigations instead. The government oversight agencies have a lot available online. They are more dry but leave out the prosaic fluff

E.g., https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#82

Post by potta_coffee » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

gwerbret wrote: post #57

mdip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

> What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories I've noticed that many supposedly serious, non-fiction books written in the past two decades begin (and are liberally interspersed) with such "prose"; I personally find it so irritating that I invariably drop the book immediately and read no further.…

It's the "long form journalism" style; try to make journalism into "art", stretch the length of the content, and slap a minimalistic design with a fresh logo on the website in an effort to get a certain kind of audience.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#83

Post by zerealshadowban » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

mdip wrote: post #44

zerealshadowban wrote: post #38

Henry Petroski has written several excellent essays and books about engineering failures, why it is inherent in engineering pursuits that there will be failures, why it is important to learn the right lessons from these failures, and why each new generation will forget past lessons. Start with: "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" (1985)

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

Yes, the populist-biography kind of writing you describe is unsatisfactory, to say the least; the reason I point to Petroski's work is that he did not write like that.

Another great book to read to examine modes of engineering failure is Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" which includes some of his thoughts on the Challenger disaster.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#84

Post by jryle70 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

gwerbret wrote: post #57

mdip wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

> What I hate when I'm reading these things is the colorful, biography-like nonsense that major publications (and self-important "journalists") like to toss into stories I've noticed that many supposedly serious, non-fiction books written in the past two decades begin (and are liberally interspersed) with such "prose"; I personally find it so irritating that I invariably drop the book immediately and read no further.…

Good story sells and can help reach a wider audience. Wouldn't that be valuable if you want people to learn from these failures?

As an example, the wiki page for Falcon 1 rocket is jam packed with information [0] There is a recent book pretty much depicting the same period [1]. I already knew the details thanks to the wiki page. That doesn't mean I'd want to skip the book.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_1

[1] - https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?v...

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#85

Post by pototo666 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:37 PM UTC

I think of this topic this very morning.

I am entering the fourth month of second entrepreneurial attemp. It feels harder than my last attemp, which failed. I have no funding (yet) and I have a child now. I can't keep 8 hours straight sleep.

Will my body cracks? I interviewed my mom this morning, who failed her several attempts in business and got lupus erythematosus.

She said that she never felt tired at that time. She just worked and worked. She used to be called the Never Tired Woman. But her businesse just didn't work. Then one day, she felt so tired. It turned out that she had this problem called lupus erythematosus. Then she gave up her career as entrepreneur. That was fifteen years ago, when she was in her fourth year as businesswoman rather than clerk.

I heard successful entrepreneurs adviced us to work as hard as you can. But what does that acutally mean? Should I work so hard as to hurt my health? My mom's story tells me, health is the prerequisite for entrepreneurship. As for working hard, there is bottom line there.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#86

Post by hutzlibu » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:38 PM UTC

mdip wrote: post #44

zerealshadowban wrote: post #38

Henry Petroski has written several excellent essays and books about engineering failures, why it is inherent in engineering pursuits that there will be failures, why it is important to learn the right lessons from these failures, and why each new generation will forget past lessons. Start with: "To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design" (1985)

My thinking is that many of the kinds of engineering failure stories you refer to are about the failure, itself, or the victims of the failure (Therac-25, for example), but not often primarily about a single individual's life of failure (or even a single individual's sole role in a failure). They might also be about the engineering teams/groups involved (Challenger explosion) and sometimes about a specific engineer (…

"Tell me what led up to the failure -- include technical details and process/technical/decision-making that led to the failure. I don't know the engineer and my interest is in the idea/technology, not the person."

I agree with the emphasis on the technical side of things, but I would argue that some failures might have indeed something to do with the person. Their characteristics and habits. Their way of life. Even their taste in music and art. That all influences failure or succed of projects. But it is surely harder to get meaningful data out of it ..

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#87

Post by forgotmypw17 » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

olivertaylor wrote: post #12

Amen! I've found that 9 times out of 10 successful people follow the same advice and believe the same things as unsuccessful people (at least they SAY they do). So it's really useful to look at people who failed yet followed the same advice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I think the important bit is to pay attention to what the successful do differently from common sense advice, not the bits that everyone follows. For example, Elon Musk's housing choices when traveling, Steve Jobs' higher education, Tesla's approaches to thinking.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#88

Post by prepend » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

IceHegel wrote: post #10

You shouldn’t be afraid of failure, but it’s a bad fetish. If failure can help future endeavors great, but there’s nothing inherently interesting about failing a lot.

There’s bad failure and good failure. I try to find the “validated learning” in a failure and that helps me distinguish good from bad.

It’s funny when people talking about how great failing is and fetishizing it without getting the point that lots of failures are good because it gets you to success faster.

But big, stupid, so if failures that are repeated over and over should be a bad sign (eg, “I failed because all my co-workers are idiots” x10 is a really bad failure because it probably means I’m the idiot and aren’t getting better)

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#89

Post by hermitcrab » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

blacktriangle wrote: post #32

The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail. So from a pov of looking to reduce my chances of failure, reading about a failure means there are now Inf - 1 ways I might fail, not too useful. Pragmatically reading about success and seeing if I can repurpose their techniques to my situation is far more useful. Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that…

If you read these 13 stories of failed software products that I collected you'll see that they have quite a lot in common: https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...

Also, hanging out on forums for software entrepreneurs, I see people making the same standard mistakes again and again.

Re: Let there be more biographies of failures

#90

Post by julienreszka » Wed, Mar 17, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

My definition of learning is "Increasing the likelihood of success" My definition of success is "Having Expectations met" => learning is increasing the likelihood of having expectations met. My definition of failure is "Having expectations not met" People don't learn to fly a plane by crashing it but by flying it with more control. The aviation industry was the product of people's success at improving the control of the plane. People who claim they can learn from failure never seem to care to explain how they do it, they only rage and scream: IT SHOULD BE THAT WAY. That would be nice...But it isn't that way. That's wishful thinking.

They only way to learn is to carefully examine how to prevent failure, and that's how eventually, people succeed and learn and succeed and learn and succeed and so on.