> But a 'negative' way to seem competent is, simply, never to make mistakes. How much of what we learn to do -- and learn to think -- is of this other variety?<p>Is it an interesting question, but I feel like the words "competent" and "expertise" set up misleading expectations. Most people are experts at walking and eating, but not nuclear physics or the history of Asian music.<p>I guess almost all of what we do at any given moment - look, talk, eat, sleep, walk, read, etc. - is this type. We abstract everything and don't consciously process most of what we see & do. Lots of people have speculated that if we were consciously thinking about every sensory input and every action we took, living would be unbearable.<p>But for learning new things, for establishing what it means to be an expert in a new field by being better than others, by doing research, by breaking new ground -- it has to be asked, what good does learned knowledge and not making mistakes serve? What is ever learned if someone doesn't make a mistake? Science doesn't move without mistakes. Nor does evolution. With competence, there's no change.<p>Maybe I'm just coming to the conclusion that being competent and becoming an expert are two completely different things?<p>> Presumably, experts have more effective censors than the rest of us<p>I'm honestly not sure why this is presumed. A lot of us would recognize that someone who's made more mistakes and learned from them is more expert than someone who's tried nothing new and has only relied on the learned "book knowledge" of mistakes of others.<p>> It annoys me how frequently people suggest that the 'secret' of making creative machines might lie in providing some sort of random or chaotic kind of search generator. Nonsense!<p>I couldn't agree more with this, it hits home having spent time practicing digital art. So many people talk about adding a random number generator as if that's going to find new things and add some magical discovery to the process. It doesn't, and there are almost always better alternatives.