The History of Making Mistakes
summary
A sequence of concrete failures anchors the talk: a 3,100 BCE clay tablet records 135,000 liters of barley and a copyist’s digit error across a 37‑month ledger; a 1628 warship, Vasa sank within a mile of launch after design tweaks and open lower gun‑ports kill 30 sailors; a 2020 banking blunder sends a $900 million wire instead of an $8M interest payment because the wrong checkbox is checked. The claim: human process, notation and communication—not vague “complexity”—drive real, measurable disasters.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12Early artistic mistakes
- 3:00First named mistake
- 7:34Wicked Bible mistake
- 9:19Why humans err
- 11:47Vasa ship disaster
- 17:27Radical ideas as mistakes
- 20:12Citibank wire transfer error
- 24:09Plato on failures
- 26:57Software failure modes
- 27:19Imperfection in brickwork
- 31:10Code as tradition
- 32:33Comfort in mistakes
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