The post’s title sounds scientifically, but I think we all do it. We experiment, fail, learn and repeat the whole life. Since our birth. And it is the right thing to do. The world is not steady and our knowledge is limited. Even the AI (artificial intelligence) needs to learn new contexts.
One of greatest Czechs Jan Werich said: “Já sám sobě připadám, že je mně stodvacetdevět let. Podle toho, co jsem zažil, anebo podle toho, co jsem nezažil. A někdy si zase něco přečtu a připadá mi, že je mi vosum.”
Translated at translate.google.com I get : “I seem to myself to be one hundred and twenty-nine years old. From what I’ve experienced, or from what I’ve never experienced. And sometimes I read something again and I feel like I’m a weasel.”, but even if “zase” means “again”, this sentence expresses a wonder, that reading something I can feel like eight years old. In non-literary Czech “vosum” is “osm”, which means eight.
Same Jan Werich together with Jiří Voskovec wrote in a play Balada z hadrů (Ballad of rags): “Tenkrát když král poslal druhýmu králi posla, aby mu vyřídil, že je vůl, no to trvalo. Dneska to máte e, e, eee, e, eee. To ví dřív, než to řeknou.”
Translated at translate.google.com I get : “When the king sent a messenger to the other king to tell him that he was an ox, it lasted. Today you have e, e, eee, e, eee. He knows that before they say it. “
I’d just like to point out, that “today” in the excerpt was in the year 1935, when the play was premiered in V+W’s Liberated Theatre, actually The Tied Theatre in that year. Just imagine, how quickly the whole world knows, that someone is an ox today, in January 2021, with the internet and social networks.
The excerpt was followed by “But the truth is that they are not so touchy today.”, which is more true today, then it was in 1935.
So let’s experiment, fail, learn and repeat. We all need to learn new things, whatever age we are. We can’t completely rely on the robots and we can’t behave like robots. Every human being has got a brain, so let’s use them.
PS: you may not know, that “an ox” is a Czech swear word, not too bad, similar to “a cow” or “a pig”.