Fail Better: With Guests Joseph Herscher & Lauren Eskreis-Winkler

<p>You hear it a lot in contemporary education, the tech world, and the arts: that it's important to fail, to make mistakes so that you can learn from them and get better at whatever you do. But that generally accepted wisdom is incomplete.</p><p>In this episode of <i>Choiceology with</i><a href="http://www.katherinemilkman.com/"><i> Katy Milkman</i></a>, we look at how failure can cloud your ability to learn and to improve.</p><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Herscher">Joseph Herscher</a> is creator of the wildly successful YouTube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/JosephsMachines"><i>Joseph's Machines</i></a>. He builds intricate and whimsical contraptions that perform simple tasks in overly complicated ways. You may know them as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine">Rube Goldberg machines</a>. Joseph's machines take months to build—and often dozens and dozens of takes to capture on video in a single shot. That's because there are so many points of failure, it's rare for these elaborate contraptions to work perfectly.</p><p>All that to say, Joseph Herscher is no stranger to failure. But his work illustrates a positive approach to a negative experience. Annoying as it can be, failure is a good way to gather useful information. </p><p>You'll hear the story of one machine that nearly didn't work at all, because of an uncooperative baby. But, in the end, Joseph's <a href="https://youtu.be/auIlGqEyTm8">Cake Server</a> was a huge success, garnering millions of views online.</p><p>Next, Katy speaks with <a href="https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/eskreis-winkler_lauren.aspx">Lauren Eskreis-Winkler</a> about her research with <a href="https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/f/ayelet-fishbach">Ayelet Fishbach</a> on how we tend to ignore some or all of the information in failure, in part because failure is uncomfortable and ego-threatening.</p><p>You can read more in the paper "<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337127055_Not_Lear