{"id":412,"date":"2008-05-29T16:16:26","date_gmt":"2008-05-29T20:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=412"},"modified":"2008-05-29T16:35:08","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T20:35:08","slug":"freeman-dyson-on-the-role-of-failure-in-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/freeman-dyson-on-the-role-of-failure-in-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Freeman Dyson on the role of failure in technology"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>You can&#8217;t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It&#8217;s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we&#8217;ve been building them for 100 years, it&#8217;s very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works &#8211; it&#8217;s even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s from a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/6.02\/dyson.html\">fantastic interview with Stewart Brand<\/a>.  I&#8217;d love to see an interview with the roles turned around.  (Incidentally, occasional commenter John Sidles gets a very nice mention by Dyson in the interview.  Way to go John!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You can&#8217;t possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It&#8217;s a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we&#8217;ve been building them for&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/freeman-dyson-on-the-role-of-failure-in-technology\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Freeman Dyson on the role of failure in technology<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}