But there needs to be an error margin: will say it's very important to make mistakes, because they are essential for development (as a motivator to learn and to change behavior).
I disagree. It's pretty counterintelligent to allow forseeable mistakes. Still, "we" do this more often than not.
In general that's likely. But I would be very careful not to make absolute assertions. Again, making mistakes (even knowingly) can lead to very positive outcomes or very important learning motivations.
And when I say knowingly... sometimes we just
think we "know" something is a foreseeable mistake, but we might just be wrong about it and in reality it's no mistake.
Just an example:
many years ago I was 100% sure that not selling my Bitcoin after making the first 5x or 10x was absolutely a mistake.
Today I think it was one of the best decisions in my life. Where would I be now without making that "mistake"...
I would say making mistakes (even knowingly) from time to time might be part of a kind of natural intelligence, or maybe you could call irrational or non-linear intelligence of natural evolution. Like a mutation that brings novelty in the world of living beings.
Nicely put, although some situations (not bitcoin) are so complex that you cannot really know which way the situation would develop, so any decision might just be randomly right or wrong.
We simply have a 'survivorship' bias.
There are many examples in evolution, markets, etc that look like, basically, a random walk.
Geoge Soros made a famous $1 bil profit in a single trade by shorting british pound and almost everyone in the investment world knows about it.
However, if they wanted, British government could have ruined that trade, just as US stopped Hunt brothers from cornering silver (by just slightly changing some rules in the middle of the "game").
They (British) probably did not care about a single billion that much.
In another example, Nick Leeson piled up $1 bil in losses and ruined his parent company (Barings Bank). One of the reasons of those was that there was an earthquake in Japan, he was over-leveraged long...and there you go. If no earthquake, maybe we would be reading about the most famous trader Nick Leeson having foundations, etc. This story was depicted in "Rogue Trader"-I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I agree. Most of the time processes are complex so that the randomness comes predominantly from the complexity. A consciously right or wrong decision is not the important factor in these cases as the outcome has less to do with that decision.
Or let's say in these cases the "ability" to make mistakes is not so important.
For the cases of more simple or untangled circumstances the entropy which is introduced by making mistakes probably has a heavier impact on the development of an situation.
Interestingly, in these cases the actor also gets a stronger feedback of his decision (as it has more impact on the outcome), so the learning effect is stronger.