Taste of Failure...

What is the taste of failure? Is it completely bitter, or does it taste of forlornness as well? Is there any other thing that ``tastes'' worse than failure? Does anyone know?

Failure is something that most people strive to avoid, just because it is the representation of a lack of an achievement, and that it is also the manifestation of the supposed inability. Such a notion is so ingrained in the psyche that for the most part, everyone views failure in disdain.

But the truth is often more stranger than perception. While failure gives the most disgusting feeling of dread to almost everyone as a general rule of thumb and is almost universally scorned. the fact remains that failure is the only way that society as a whole progresses. Allow me to further illustrate this point.

The entire advancement of science as a knowledge system is based wholly on that of failure---each time a theory fails on a particular case, a new theory has to be concocted that will ``fix'' the broken theory. But if a theory has always been successful thus far, there is no guarantee that it is actually correct, since scientific theories are based largely on the principle of empiricism than induction as in mathematics; just because the theory works for the last large number of trials does not necessary mean that it will be simultaneously successful for the next trial, though we will, without loss of generality, assume from past verifications that it is still ``correct'' as far as we can tell for the foreseeable future.

So from the individual's perspective, failure is among the most distasteful of positions to be in, yet paradoxically, for the global good, we find that it is of an utmost necessity. This is not the first time we are seeing this phenomenon---I have talked about this some time ago regarding the optimisation problem, where the global optimum does not necessarily mean that every single individual comprising the group under study will benefit.

But of course, no one really wants to taste failure...