Article type
8 articles
All articlesStefan Gaillard, Stefan van Geelen, Elvire Landstra & Arno Hoes
Uncertainty is a daily reality in the health domain. Clinicians routinely face it when diagnosing patients, predicting outcomes, and selecting treatments in partnership with patients. Patients and their families, in turn, experience uncertainty about their condition and what the future may hold.…
Berent Prakken
“Boys we were - but good boys. If I may say so myself. We’re much smarter now, so smart it’s pathetic.” (Nescio, 2012)
Sarahanne Field, Stefan D.M. Gaillard, David Joachim Grüning & Alex Job Visser
In most industries, error is a problem. Take, for instance, the aviation industry. An error in the calculation of a plane’s gross weight could be catastrophic, as how much a plane weighs directly influences how it needs to be configured for take-off and landing. Countless fatal aviation accidents…
Sarahanne Field, Noah van Dongen & Leo Tiokhin
The scientific community has entered a challenging era, as originally noted by Wagenmakers (2012) . High-profile instances of fraud, failures to replicate foundational studies in psychology, and admissions of research misconduct (John et al., 2012) cast a shadow over the field of psychology…
Wendy Ross, Samantha Copeland & Stuart Firestein
Serendipity refers to the combination of “accident” and “sagacity”; an unexpected and unpredicted event which is noticed by an agent with the right skills to make the most of it. Famous examples include Jocelyn Bell’s discovery of pulsars which was made after she noticed an unusual output from a…
Stefan Gaillard & Sean Devine
It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that failure is systematically ignored in academia. The entire culture of academia revolves around a notion of linear progress made in leaps and bounds by great thinkers, rather than the more realistic image of science as an ongoing process of…
Rebecca C. Sindall & Dani J. Barrington
Failure is an integral part of learning: The adage “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again” was originally coined to encourage children to persevere with their school work (Palmer, 1840) . In the same way that we expect people to fail during the learning process as they gain new skills,…
Sean Devine, Max Bautista Perpinyà, Valentine Delrue, Stefan Gaillard, Thomas F. K. Jorna, Martijn van der Meer, Lottricia Millett, Chelsea Pozzebon & Jobke Visser
With the publication of our first issue, we are pleased to formally introduce the Journal of Trial and Error (JOTE). Our goal in this editorial article is to (i) outline the problem JOTE aims to solve, (ii) detail our solution, and (iii) state our goals as a journal. As readers will see, we…
