#081: Mistakes Were Made
We humans make mistakes all the time. Most of them are small and without much consequence. Some mistakes, while not grave, can make you look like an idiot. For example, when Nike announced that Colin Kaepernick would be the face of their next ad campaign, certain people were quick to protest Nike’s decision on social media. However, when Stefan Heck tweeted a screenshot showing an order for 6500 pairs of Nike shoes (totalling $1.3m), to be sent directly to the dumpster, the same people denounced him an idiot. Who was that idiot, and why would he give Nike more money?
Except it should have been fairly obvious that he was making fools of them, had they bothered to look closely at his screenshot, or taken a look at his profile. Instead, even when the joke was pointed out to them, they doubled down, refusing to accept that they made a mistake. It’s a familiar cycle that we can experience every day online, as Heck writes:
If you aren’t familiar with how Twitter works, each morning, somebody posts something stupid. The rest of Twitter takes turns pummeling this person into submission. Then, we forget what we were mad about and do it all over again the next day.
Mistakes in Software
Car recalls are common nowadays, especially due to software issues. So when Subaru had to recall their 2019 Ascent SUVs due to a software error, it was a bit of a surprise that the cars would not be updated, but sent to the crusher to be destroyed.
As it turns out, the problem was indeed the software, but not the one in the car. Instead, the robots on the manufacturing line were not programmed correctly, and did not make some welds when they were supposed to, so Subaru hat no choice but to destroy the affected cars.
Technically not a mistake, but still
Twitter was, until not too long ago, famously limited to 140 characters. And since character counting is not as straightforward as you might think (refer to Issue #70 as to why), Twitter would sometimes count certain emojis as multiple characters — specifically, those emojis that used gendered versions, or a non-standard skin tone. But no longer: Twitter announced that they would no longer do so, making all emojis equal regardless of gender or race. Not an update most people will notice, but it does correct a weird instance of something that amounted to sexist or racist behavior online.
Some Mistakes aren’t Mistakes
For the longest time, astronomers were pretty sure that other stars must have planets too. So when a team of researchers announced in 1988 that they had found an exoplanet orbiting Gamma Cephei, it caused quite the uproar. However, they later had to retract their discovery, since it turned out that their measurements could also be explained by variations in the host star itself, making the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12 the first confirmed discovery of exoplanets.
But then the story took another turn, when further measurements in 2003 revealed that the host star had been misclassified. This meant that the measurements made in 1988 did indeed point to an exoplanet! Thus, the team was retroactively regarded as the first one to have found an exoplanet after all.
Mistakes Were Made, By Someone Else
Sometimes, when you go out to eat, something goes wrong with your food. You get the wrong thing, it’s cold when it should be hot, or the chef just screwed up cooking it. Would you dare send back the food if that happened? If that thought makes you uneasy, then it tells you something surprising about yourself: Stop being so egoistic. Why it’s OK to send restaurant food back
Hindsight is 20/20
When the Dieselgate scandal broke, German cars had been powerhouses in the years before, generally being at, or at least close to, the top of current car technology. But trouble was already brewing on the horizon even before the scandal broke — everyone else was busy innovating on electric cars, while the Germans were resting on their technical laurels, and dragging their feet. After Dieselgate, they were forced to catch up and invest more into their electric car programs in order to make amends, possibly making the scandal the best thing that could have happened to them: How Dieselgate saved Germany’s car industry.
The Ostrich Approach
Speaking of Dieselgate, if the car company managers had taken the ostrich approach to handling mistakes, it definitely would have turned out differently.
📖 Weekly Longread 📚
In 2008, SpaceX was on the verge of running out of money, having failed to launch their Falcon 1 rocket three times in a row. So when they prepared to launch another one on September 28th, it was literally do or die for the young company: Inside the eight desperate weeks that saved SpaceX from ruin.