A comment on the talk of Kathryn Shultz

First, would like to suggest this TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Now, I just share some ideas I have about the subject.

Using the mathematical theory of information it its possible to calc the information provided by the occurrence of an event. It happens to be inversely proportional to the probability of the occurrence of that event. This is, the more likely the event, the less information you receive when it actually occurs.

So, having things clear, planning our actions, executing them, and verifying we were right leave us, at the end, with a net information increase about the out world equal to zero. This is because, since we had things clear from the beginning, in our minds there was a 100% probability that outcome would be as we expected.

As a consequence, there are only two ways of increasing the information we have about the world: either we do things we are not 100% sure about, either we make mistakes. Both cases are exciting.

The problem with current education is that it oppress these situations, leading people to try to avoid them. This is simply a reminder that current educational model is specifically designed to avoid the increase of information about the world, while simply keeping the one we already have.

An equilibrium should exist in which the learning rate is maximized by allowing, and even encouraging, mistakes.