Two friends were walking the trail to downtown. The first gestured toward the river and said: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to load up that bridge to see how much weight it could take? Then bam! It’ll snap at some point. That’d be awesome.”
The second looked up and smiled, “Sure it’d be fun, but I’d never actually do it. I’d rather keep the bridge.”
“C’mon, stop being so serious. I’m not considering it; I just think it’s interesting.”
“Sorry; just how my brain works.”
They walked a bit farther, now pensive.
The first spoke up: “Alright, now you’ve got me thinking. Are you saying we shouldn’t test things because it’s not worth the hassle? Like bridges, or cars? I mean…” He paused before continuing, “That’s how we learn isn’t it? Through failure? How are we supposed to progress if we don’t break stuff?”
“Was that bridge built for testing?”
“Well, I suppose not. But -”
“Then we’ll never test it. There are more productive ways to gain that knowledge. We need that bridge. It gets plenty of testing just through daily use, and so far it’s doing pretty well.”
“We could test it just a little, to see where it flexes. I mean, you have to test the real thing to get real results. If we never tested that bridge we would never know how much weight it could take.”
“But if we tested that bridge to find out we’d never be able to use it. It works fine. Why do we need to know how much weight it could take?”
“What if it fails?”
“Ah, well, if it fails…”
“Would you endanger people’s lives because you’re unwilling to do a little testing?”
“No no, of course not. You’re forgetting we already have a reasonable knowledge of what failure looks like. We’ve seen many bridges fail before and so have a good prediction of this one.”
“That’s my point exactly! We can’t learn unless we fail!”
“But, just because we learn from failure doesn’t mean we should break things.”
They took a few steps in silence.
“… Look this is getting philosophical.”
“You’re just saying that because you know I’m right.”
“I’m just saying it would be cool to see how much the bridge could take.”
“The bridge itself is worth much more than the knowledge you would gain from breaking it.”
The first paused and turned to look his friend in the face. They locked eyes for a moment before he turned his eyes back to the path.
“It feels like your always trying to make some deeper point in our conversations.”
“I am.”
The first looked up to the sky and laughed.
“Get outta here! Speaking of failure, have you watched the Pirates lately?”
