The False Judgements Towards Failure
Our society frowns upon failure as something purely negative, despite the positive side effects it has. Take, for example, the business man shouldering the risk of bringing up a project for something he thinks is worthwhile doing.
While being a controversial person, Elon Musk running SpaceX is a good example. In his career he failed not just a single time. In fact, I am confident that he has already 'failed' countless expensive times. Also it is worth mentioning what I think is often lost in the big picture of public attention. While often being a driving force that already manifests in disrupting projects getting started, he is neither achieving his successes nor failures doing a one man show.
He and his team performed "unscheduled disassemblies" more often than desirable, while groundbreaking technological advances occurred across projects at the same time.
However, the public perception rather divides into black and white. Yes, the big rocket exploded, and yes, Grok went mad or looked up Elon's opinion on a topic, but SpaceX is already routinely delivering satellites to space, while the next iteration of the rocket and Grok performs even better. Until the next failure, that is. Things get looked at in an event based form, and with them the whole effort is either reduced to complete success or complete failure up to the current point in time, throwing away the road traveled, the efforts put in, and the progress it already took to even get there.
Active iteration, failures, and development make true progress, not sitting at a desk, calculating, and planning until perfection. Even though some may think this.
Take another more every day, like the example of shooting rockets into space: the scientist working on a research project. With the road map set out, long sought after money granted, the bureaucratic jungle tamed, and eager to get going, the scientist does not have much opportunity to wander off the set out landscape.
The scientist, already nose deep in finds, finds out that the cancer drug he is researching or the metal he is trying out for improved solar panels isn't working out the way he hoped. But wait a moment! It could actually be a possibility to do great against migraine or in a burner engine. Well, that's too bad, because that is not in the budget, and the all knowing paper says this whole ordeal was in order to get a cancer, not a migraine drug.
What if you research something and you find out that it just didn't work out? You're a loser! What about the knowledge you found? The next scientist in line to come across this topic is surely thankful for someone that already did the dirty work. Maybe he can focus on improving upon his predecessor, trying another way, or even focus his attention on something different. Our glorious predecessor surely has documented and published this, no? Not necessarily. The science is not always as clean as people seem to think, as is nothing on this earth.
Studies that get bent in a way that's convenient or that are simply sloppy, statistics and numbers that you keep looking at until they willingly say what you need to hear. Something is better than nothing.
At least not failure, right?