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 prevents people from even trying, but there's only so much of that form of self-help a person needs before they move on.
>The problem with failure is there are infinite ways to fail
Do you mean infinite ways in life? I’m trying to reconcile your statement as it would apply to a specific domain rather than something as broad as the scope of ones life.
Reliability engineering would tend to disagree with the above quote. For a specific engineering application there are a certain number of fault modes that can be ideally mitigated and quantified as a reliability risk. Good engineering practice documents these in the form of fault trees, failure mode effects analysis etc. Sure, unknown failure modes still may pop up, but to the point of the article, if they get discussed and documented they can be mitigated in future iterations. While maybe never reaching zero, over time the remaining unknown risks become smaller and smaller probability events.
I was thinking of it more in ways businesses fails given we're on HN and that's a bit more narrow than the "in life" version of the article so that it's more useful.
However that's a really great point that in the context of a specific engineering application failure can be enumerated to the point where such study of failure is incredibly powerful. Thanks for pointing that out.
You also need to read about failure to account for survivorship bias.
Eg, did some entity fail even though they were doing the same things as the successful entities?
If you detect that, then it's evidence that the techniques of the successful entities are no guarantee of success. That some other technique or factor or luck was the actual differentiator.
That's useful information when you're trying to decide what techniques of successful entities may be worth repurposing to your situation or not.
Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity"
Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail.
The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.
As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations of software exceptions based on the following categories:
- Synchronicity, Scope, Origin
For Synchronicity we have:
- Synchronicity
- Asynchronicity
For Scope we have:
- Process-specific
- Cross-process
For Origin we have:
- Data origin
- Temporal origin
- External origin
- Process origin
Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme, it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is.
See: “Error Handling in Process Support Systems” by Casati & Cugola.
There are categories of failure though. Those not only tell you where to look but give you starting points and substitutions.
Substitute one set of problems for a better known set, and go from there. When engineering figures out how to solve the less known set, then you can do something “new”.
Today you might solve liquefaction by running pillars to bedrock and then design for earthquake damage caused by being anchored to bedrock.
Some day you might use the Dutch trick of building houses that can float instead.
Where reading about failure is useful is to help remove the general stigma around failure that prevents people from even trying, but there's only so much of that form of self-help a person needs before they move on.