If you’re a politician, admitting you’re wrong is a weakness, but if you’re an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you’re always right, then you aren’t getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be.
(via Metafilter)
Although I agree that engineers should experiment and risk being wrong, I don’t think this should extend to product launches by large public corporations. The experimentation should be relegated to the R&D division, not to product marketing.
