It’s Funny How We Learn from Our Mistakes

Oh yes, I remember those times when I was little. Those were great times. I remember those days of endless discovery, endless fun, and endless curiosity. Oh yeeees, my curiosity. I remember it as though it were yesterday, though I know that those times were nearly two decades ago. I was always very curious: I always wanted to know how something worked, or why my dad left the house to go every morning with a briefcase and what my mom used to call, “work stuff.” Sometimes my insatiable thirst for random knowledge would get me into trouble, however. Oh yeeeees, trouble, I remember that from my childhood just as clearly. It was what whipped me into shape so that I didn’t become one of the many rude people I constantly see around me all the time nowadays. But the punishments didn’t only make me into a well-mannered person, they also gave me an incentive to learn from some of the mistakes that I made in the childhood, like “tinkering” with the ceiling fan by putting broom into it while it was still on and moving at high speed - boy, what a day that was! But there’s actually a funny connotation that comes with punishments. You see, it seems like it’s just about the only means of incentive humanity has in keeping from making similar mistakes at a much bigger scale.

Don’t misconceive what I was saying in the paragraph above, I was not stating that we humans do not learn without punishment - there is a perfect argument against it: we learn some things like mathematical concepts without punishment daily. I’m just saying that in many of the bigger endeavors that we humans go through, we do only seem to learn from our mistakes when punishment comes around. But let’s not misconceive punishment, either. I am not referring to something like, say, a famine induced by God. I’m referring to the kinds of things that happen in concurrence to Murphy’s Law: what can go wrong will go wrong. In other words, I mean that punishments, in this sense, are the accidents just waiting to happen and do happen when given the right time, such as when things that have mistakes are conceived, with the mistakes going unfixed.

My point in which Murphy’s Law is the main means of punishment against humanity in general can be seen time and time again throughout different points in our history. For one, let’s go back to the maiden voyage of the Titanic. Though it was considered to be unsinkable, Murphy’s Law considered otherwise. What happened? A little iceberg cut into the side hull of the ship, sinking it. The result? More than half of its passengers either drowned or froze to death in the middle of the North Atlantic. Then there comes the Hindenberg disaster. Thanks to hydrogen being used as the main source for the craft’s buoyancy, a small spark, thanks to Murphy’s Law, caused the vehicle to burst into flames, and wrought out the everlasting famous quote, “Oh the humanity!” But these two events were several decades ago, surely we have learned a lot about the tactics of Murphy’s Law by now, right? Wrong. You see, don’t you remember the time in which the city of New Orleans got some serious flooding because it happened to be under sea level? So, given that Murphy’s Law has always been our grand “natural punisher,” surely we have learned from our mistakes.

Of course we have learned from our mistakes, to a degree. For example, we now design cruise ships with lifeboats to occupy all of its passengers at any given time. We also now design blimps that are filled with helium rather than hydrogen to avoid combustion. But there’s still one single problem: we still, much of the time, have yet to resolve problems of situations that are hypothetical, and thus haven’t occurred. We still seem to fix problems on the basis of whether or not they have led to disaster. We don’t bother thinking about the “what-ifs” all that much, not even the most plausible it seems. For example, I have seen no developments in the news covering the reinforcing of global power grids during a hypothetical solar storm. It looks like we’re going to have to wade through a solar storm before we start doing those developments…