#human fallibility

Bill’s initials here are listed as A.E. rather than E.A.? I may be completely missing something here, but I’ve never seen him referred to anywhere as Adrian Edward rather than Edward Adrian; though it seems a rather glaring typo to have made on such a prominent monument. Any ideas?

People make mistakes sometimes.

The plaque at the Cape Crozier igloo says the Winter Journey party got there in June 1911 when it fact it was July – they had departed Cape Evans in June. The handful of people who would ever visit are the most likely people in the world to notice the mistake. But to err is human ... it's only a little more embarrassing when one does so in bronze. I'm guessing the text was assembled by someone who didn't know, made a transcription error, and it wasn't caught until it was too late.

That the Earth is flat. That the universe is six thousand years old. That the Moon is a hologram. That the Apollo astronauts conducted negotiations with the people of Venus.

What do Rick Rosner’s favorite quotes, thinkers, and inherited philosophies reveal about his view of humanity’s future? Rick Rosner joins Scott Douglas Jacobsen to explore wisdom both cynical and comedic—from Occam’s Razor to soup jokes. He discusses his admiration for writers like Neal Stephenson, Margaret Atwood, and Carl Hiaasen, who illuminate near-future chaos with humor and insight.…

I feel the only hope anyone has for getting anything right is to use reliable processes for determining truth. If someone says a machine or a process works, test it. If someone makes a statement about something that happened, what is the source of this information? Does it say the same thing? Is it reliable? In cases where any assertions are made about complex systems, such as human behavior or politics, how much thought has been given to the limitations and biases and uncertainties of any model of these things?

So, I once encountered an interesting way of looking at how cultures, communities, groups, etc. approach morality and human fallibility. The original author termed them “Catholic” and “Protestant” — refering not so much to explicit theologies of either branch of Christianity as with trends the associated cultures —but I prefer to think of them as the “sky” approach and the “ground” approach. Note that these are ideal types marking ends of a spectrum, with real-world examples falling in between with varying degrees of both.

The “sky” approach is about setting a perfect ideal to aspire towards… and I say “towards” rather than “to” because, being “perfect”, such an ideal cannot be truly reached by fallible, imperfect human beings. Everybody falls short to some degree, everybody makes mistakes, and there has to be some forgiveness for that. One might reach for the sky, but one will never actually touch the sky. Which is not to say that we all equally fall short, that some mistakes aren’t much bigger than others, or that forgiveness is automatic. You have to at least learn from your mistakes and try to do better, and you can be judged on your efforts, or lack thereof.

The other approach, the “ground” approach, is about setting a “floor” — a minimum standard which one should take care to always remain above. That’s not to say that simply meeting that minimum is sufficient; one should always look to be better than “minimally good/decent.” Nor does it mean that falling below the floor is totally unforgivable and there’s no coming back. It’s like the approach in school where you’re focused on not failing a class. Sure, the higher the grade you get, the better, and if you do fail it’s probably not the end of the world, but Priority One remains not flunking. Laws and written rules pretty much always take the ground approach.

“Science is more than a body of knowledge it is a way of thinking a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility”