Often when humans make a discovery through trial and error, they also find a way they could have figured it out without the experiments.
This is basically always the case in software engineering—any failure, from a routine failed unit test up to a major company outage, was obviously-in-restrospective avoidable by being smarter.
Humans are nonetheless incapable of developing large complex software systems without lots of trial and error.
I know less of physical engineering, so I ask non-rhetorically: does it not have the ‘empirical results are foreseeable in retrospect’ property?
I think you can do things you already know how to do without trial and errors but that you can not learn knew things or tasks without trial and errors.
That’s a reasonable position, though I’m not sure if it’s OP’s.
My own sense is that even for novel physical systems, the ‘how could we have foreseen these results’ question tends to get answered—the difference being it maybe gets answered a few decades later by a physicist instead of immediately by the engineering team.
Often when humans make a discovery through trial and error, they also find a way they could have figured it out without the experiments.
This is basically always the case in software engineering—any failure, from a routine failed unit test up to a major company outage, was obviously-in-restrospective avoidable by being smarter.
Humans are nonetheless incapable of developing large complex software systems without lots of trial and error.
I know less of physical engineering, so I ask non-rhetorically: does it not have the ‘empirical results are foreseeable in retrospect’ property?
I think you can do things you already know how to do without trial and errors but that you can not learn knew things or tasks without trial and errors.
That’s a reasonable position, though I’m not sure if it’s OP’s.
My own sense is that even for novel physical systems, the ‘how could we have foreseen these results’ question tends to get answered—the difference being it maybe gets answered a few decades later by a physicist instead of immediately by the engineering team.