But when you look over the history of science, you see many more examples of fortunate discoveries than you see of planned ones. Here’s Taleb:
The luck versus knowledge story is as follows. Ironically, we have vastly more evidence for results linked to luck than to those coming from the teleological, outside physics —even after discounting for the sensationalism. In some opaque and nonlinear fields, like medicine or engineering, the teleological exceptions are in the minority, such as a small number of designer drugs. This makes us live in the contradiction that we largely got here to where we are thanks to undirected chance, but we build research programs going forward based on direction and narratives. And, what is worse, we are fully conscious of the inconsistency.
“Opaque and nonlinear” just about sums up a lot of drug discovery and development, let me tell you. But Taleb goes on to say that “trial and error” is a misleading phrase, because it tends to make the two sound equivalent. What’s needed is an asymmetry: the errors need to be as painless as possible, compared to the payoffs of the successes. The mathematical equivalent of this property is called convexity; a nonlinear convex function is one with larger gains than losses. If they’re equal, the function is linear. In research, this is what allows us to “harvest randomness”, as the article puts it.
Nassim Taleb on Scientific Discovery. In the Pipeline:
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