Author Topic: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail  (Read 2565 times)

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Offline Hot_Dog

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Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« on: March 30, 2011, 02:51:02 pm »
This is my entry for the Contest "New Threats to Freedom," referencing the youtube video "Michael Goodwin on the loss of the freedom to fail."  


I am required to post this essay on a site that is visible to the public eye.  Please feel free to discuss this topic and agree or disagree with me, but do not edit it in any way, shape or form.


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On Losing Our Freedom To Fail


One will not find it difficult to believe that social promotion protects the self esteem of students in school.  A scholar who passes a class feels pleased with himself, and without a doubt is more confident about his upcoming year, certain that he possesses the qualities needed to pass yet another class.

It is impossible, however, to rid our world of failure entirely.  Sooner or later every one of us reaches a situation in which we mess up.  Whether we like it or not, none of us are going to live an absolutely perfect, carefree life.  This does not necessarily mean failure is bad.  Indeed, we are provided with knowledge such what to avoid, how to better ourselves, who to trust and how to find a good job.  Through failure, we find our mistakes and learn how to keep from making them again.  

Considering that every mistake helps us for the future, we must note that failures in small areas keep us from experiencing a tremendous blow to our lives from failures in larger areas.  Football players always make mistakes when they practice their plays and technique.  In learning from their errors, the team is ready for its first game, a game that will reward the players with favorable odds.  Similarly, as a music composer I fail several times at writing a work that is memorable.  By correcting my mistakes and learning from them I can avoid the humiliation of premiering music that is despised by the audience.

What happens, then, if we are not allowed to learn from our mistakes?  What happens when we lose our freedom to fail?  We don’t have any experience to prevent us from making decisions that punish us more than simply affecting our self esteem.  We could have disappointments that affect our family, our emotions or even our lives.

Suppose, for example, that one enters a school that believes in social promotion and has incorporated it into practice.  The student, of course, will graduate with a high school diploma.  When the student enters college and requires remedial work, however, he is required to pay a tremendous amount of finances, perhaps enough to require the student to borrow money that he will have a hard time repaying.  To make matters worse, the student may not be able to stay in college, whether due to finances or the lack of knowledge.  In a society where one can scarcely get a job without a college degree, this proves to be troublesome for the student who could have used smaller failures to avoid larger ones.

In conclusion, we need the freedom to fail to prepare us for some of life’s greatest challenges.  As we learn how to better ourselves in smaller areas, we become better equipped to succeed in larger and more crucial situations.  We require accomplishment to function well in our society, and only when we learn from failure are we able to succeed.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2011, 02:52:06 pm by Hot_Dog »

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2011, 03:28:02 pm »
Yeah I agree that when we fail it helps us find our mistakes and learn from them. One thing I soemtimes noticed at some jobs or when interacting with other people at school is that it seems we're not even allowed to do mistakes. We'll succeed and succeed and barely get rewarded, but when we do one tiny mistake, we are looked upon like if we commited the most heinous crime ever.

I saw this happen in the TI community too, before, and also another example I want to cite is that it seems that when someone never fails, people seem to take that for granted with the time and if one day he fails, he's treated 10x worse than he was prior that. Take the Tiger Woods drama, for example. Another example is my other forum TIMGUL. Everything was running smoothly and we had no fights in the 1.5 years the site was online, then one day, one little mistake caused things to escalate and the community to split, falling apart.

We need the freedom to fail, in the way that "losing is learning" (assuming you do your best to not repeat the same mistakes again), but also to be given another chance to do better. If you bought an online game and on your first loss you got banned from playing forever for losing, it means you're not allowed to learn.

Offline ZippyDee

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Re: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2011, 03:33:28 pm »
Unfortunately society has developed to the point where failure is almost always looked down upon.
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Offline Hot_Dog

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Re: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« Reply #3 on: March 31, 2011, 01:12:02 pm »
Indeed.  In fact, the only people who get noticed for success are those who do so quickly and without any failure.  No longer are we in the days of Thomas Edison:

"1000 failures?  What are you talking about?  I've succeeded!  I've found 1000 things that won't work in a light bulb!"

Offline DJ Omnimaga

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Re: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« Reply #4 on: April 05, 2011, 12:59:18 am »
Unfortunately society has developed to the point where failure is almost always looked down upon.
Well said. It's incredible how someone will be liked for his achievements, then as soon as he does one little mistake or slack off, he's treated like crap.

On the other hand, I also hate when some ppl fail all the time and does no effort to improve, then as excuse to them being allowed to fail, they bring up something in particular they succeeded in, like if they were perfect and never did anything wrong so we are not allowed to call them out.
« Last Edit: April 05, 2011, 01:00:25 am by DJ_O »

Offline z80man

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Re: Concerning Our Freedom To Fail
« Reply #5 on: April 05, 2011, 01:31:12 am »
Whenever I see stuff like this, I think of how I can apply good programming practices to real life situations. Lets start with how I learned TI BASIC. I did not know that there was any sort of online tutorials and the such when I started. I just pushed the pgrm button on my calc and just started doing random things. After many Err Syntax and Err Arguments, stuff started happening. Through this trial and error I learned my very first programming language.

Then later on I started learning z80 asm. Now for this I got help with online tutorials because it is almost impossible to do on your own. Even still when I started to branch off from the example programs, failure confronted me all of the time in the form of crashing my calc. (honestly, you can't call yourself an asm coder if you haven't crashed your calc at least a 100 times ;)) But by experimenting and failing, I was able to learn my first assembly language. After this I started to learn many more asm languages and applied what I already knew.

Last off is true if you ever tried to learn C/C++/Java/Python/etc... In tutorials you are often encouraged to produce compile/runtime errors to see what happens. That way you know how to respond when you face difficult situations. That is what I consider a prime example of learning by failing. Now if only real life was like learning to program, then you would be encouraged to make mistakes that way you could learn. And finally, if you never make mistakes, then you are not educated nor experienced because you know of only half of what is life.

List of stuff I need to do before September:
1. Finish the Emulator of the Casio Prizm (in active development)
2. Finish the the SH3 asm IDE/assembler/linker program (in active development)
3. Create a partial Java virtual machine  for the Prizm (not started)
4. Create Axe for the Prizm with an Axe legacy mode (in planning phase)
5. Develop a large set of C and asm libraries for the Prizm (some progress)
6. Create an emulator of the 83+ for the Prizm (not started)
7. Create a well polished game that showcases the ability of the Casio Prizm (not started)