In his book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel Dennett’s first intuition pump is to extol the virtues of boldly making mistakes. He describes it in this way:

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them – if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress. Of course there are times when it is really important not to make any mistakes – ask any surgeon or airline pilot. But it is less widely appreciated that there are also times when making mistakes is the only way to go. Many of the students who arrive at very competitive universities pride themselves in not making mistakes – after all, that’s how they’ve come so much farther than their classmates, or so they have been led to believe. I often find that I have to encourage them to cultivate the habit of making mistakes, the best learning opportunities of all. They get “writers block” and waste hours forlornly wandering back and forth on the starting line. “Blurt it out!” I urge them. Then they have something on the page to work with.

This reminds me about the old joke about how one should go about carving an elephant out of granite. The tongue-in-cheek advice is to just start with a big hunk of granite, and then chip away all the parts that don’t look like an elephant. Dennett is advocating a similar approach – throw the unformed granite block of your thoughts out there, and let all the parts that don’t work get chipped away as your mistakes are found and corrected.

Dennett cheerfully describes himself as “an experienced mistake-maker myself. I’ve made some dillies, and hope to make a lot more.” But there is a key to being a good mistake-maker, Dennett says, and that is a willingness, even eagerness, to let your ideas get chipped away:

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are…The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.

Mistakes are good when they are quickly identified, corrected, and learned from. I’m on the record as believing that most new ideas are terrible – and this is true whether the new ideas are coming from private actors in the market, or from policymakers acting from the state. The crucial difference is that in markets, the identification and correction of mistakes is swift, but the same can’t be said for the mistakes of policymakers. 

For example, in my post explaining that most new ideas are terrible, I used the example of an upcoming tech product called the R1 Rabbit, and why I thought it would be a flop. Since I wrote that, the product has been released, and the consensus that has developed since then is that the product is, indeed, pretty terrible. Another product I could have mentioned in that post is the Humane AI pin, which seemed even more half-baked to me. This, too, seems to have become the general consensus, and at present Humane is seeing the product returned at a faster rate than they can sell it. 

I suspect both of these companies are not long for this world. A significant amount of time, effort, and money was put into building the companies and producing the products. And some people ended up spending money to get a product that turned out to be half-baked. This is certainly not ideal – but the correction is happening swiftly. 

Compare this to another bad policy I recently highlighted, when “King William III instigated a tax on windows, on the assumption that dwellings and buildings with lots of windows were likely to be owned by the wealthy, and thus this would serve as a way to tax the rich.” But, as recorded in Scott Hodge’s book Taxocracy, “the tax ‘led to especially wretched conditions for the poor in the cities, as landlords blocked up windows and constructed tenements without adequate light and ventilation.’ Some buildings were constructed with no windows on some floors leading to the ‘propagation of numerous diseases such as dysentery, gangrene, and typhus.’”

This, too, was less than ideal. It caused people to live in unnecessarily miserable, dark, and stuffy conditions. Disease spread more rapidly, costing many people their lives and inflicting significant pain and suffering on those who survived. This, too, was eventually fixed – the tax was eventually repealed. But the tax and its ill effects lasted for 150 years before that happened. 

Entrepreneurs are not necessarily smarter than state policymakers, nor do they have an intrinsic ability to come up with better ideas. But when entrepreneurs make mistakes, the error doesn’t last long. Policymakers can make mistakes that cause disease, suffering, and death and those policies can continue on for multiple human lifetimes before the error is corrected. 

Arnold Kling often used the mantra “Markets fail. Use markets.” Yes – because when markets fail, they fail swiftly and correct swiftly. Dennett advises his students to guard against hiding their mistakes, especially from themselves. But state policymakers have the ability to hide away or overlook their mistakes in a way that simply doesn’t exist in the market, making those mistakes so long-lived as to border on immortality.