October 17, 2025 • 44 mins
In 1983, a plane takes off from Ottawa with less than half the required fuel on board. As the engines cut out one by one, the pilot is left with a ticking clock and an impossible task. But what does a tale of an unusual plane crash have in common with one about a disappearing canal?
For this special episode, Tim is joined by colleagues from across Pushkin's podcast network. Heavyweight's Jonathan Goldstein stops by to muse on the cost of mistakes and whether we're really in control of how many we make. Plus, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova from the podcast Risky Business give a gambler's take on the strange science of regret.
Heavyweight and Risky Business are available wherever you get your podcasts.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hello, this is Tim Harford here, host of Cautionary Tales,
the show that tells you stories of catastrophes from the
past and explores what we can learn from them. Today,
our podcast is taking over the Pushkin Network for a
(00:35):
very special episode. I've invited some of the great and
good from Pushkin to join me to give their take
on the nature of mistakes and how we should think
about them. Coming up, Nate Silver and Maria Khonnikova, hosts
of Risky Business, on regretting mistakes and the mistake of regrets.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
You see that people are afraid of regretting selling a
stock and then having it go up.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
They fear that more than they.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Regret, you know, holding on to it and having it
go down.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And then Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight muses with author Sheila
Hetty about how we should feel about mistakes based on
her experiences with accidental ketamin, missing money, and a flying baby.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
I was on the ground and somebody threw me this child,
and I remember thinking in that moment, you cannot drop
this baby.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
But first, I want to kick things off with a
classic cautionary tale, A strange happening in a canal. It's
(02:02):
nineteen seventy eight, a dredging gang working for British Waterways
a struggling with a stuff problem on the picturesque Chesterfield Canal.
They're trying to strengthen a section of the canal's side wall,
which means dredging away silt and removing submerged junk. That's
(02:22):
not easy at the best of times. But what really
has them stumped is a length of heavy iron chain.
It's blocking their efforts and it simply refuses to budge. Eventually,
the foreman calls in the dredging boat. The crew attaches
a line to the chain and revs up the dredger's engines.
(02:45):
It pulls, and it pulls, and at last that does
the trick. With a sharp tug, the chain finally comes unstuck.
The crew remove it and the block of wood attached
to it, and then take a well earned break for lunch.
(03:08):
Lunch is dudely interrupted by a policeman in a state
of some excitement. He had been passing the normally tranquil
waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool.
By the time the crew returned to the scene, the
canal has gone All that remain are a number of
(03:33):
stranded houseboats and pleasure cruisers, not to mention the dredger
itself wallowing in mud. Those, of course, and a plug hole.
The plug hole had been installed by the designer of
the Chesterfield Canal more than two hundred years earlier, but
(03:53):
all records of it had been destroyed in a wartime
fire in the nineteen forties, since there were no dredging
boats in seventeen seventy five when the canal was opened,
it was designed to be easy to drain in sections
to allow works to jump in and shovel out the
accumulated silt. This particular section was a mile and a
(04:16):
half long, and the entire stretch was now nothing but
mud and the occasional rusted bicycle. The canal itself had
gurgled off to join the nearby river Idol. One of
the workmen explained, we didn't know there was a plug.
(04:41):
I first heard this story from the book that inspired
the Cautionary Tales podcast The World's Greatest Mistakes by Nigel Blundell.
It's full of these kinds of stories that are funny
or tragic or both. I read it when I was
a boy, and decades later It's what inspired me to
start making a podcast about mistakes and what we can
(05:02):
learn from them. So what can we learn from a
vanishing canal? There's the obvious if something really really hard
to move, it might be wiser to leave it in place.
There's another lesson too, but I'll come back to that later.
Before that, it's time to introduce our first guests for
(05:22):
the episode, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova, hosts of the
excellent podcast Risky Business. Nate and Maria are dedicated to
learning from mistakes, and their show is entirely about how
to make better decisions. Nature's a statistician, Maria's a psychologist,
and they're both journalists as well as high stakes poker players.
(05:46):
It's their business to have a keen sense of risk
and reward. When I asked them for some insight about mistakes,
Maria really wanted to talk about the power of one thing,
in particular, regret.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Nate, are there any decisions lately that you didn't make?
An now you're just experiencing a sense of regret, Because
that's what we're going to talk about today, psychology of
regret and how it affects our decision making.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
The things.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We didn't do the risks, we didn't take the hands,
we did not play, the bluffs, we did not run.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
In Everly, Maria, I started to think about poker hands,
particularly a high stakes poker hand that I played maybe
six months ago, where the short version is like a
player made a bet that I thought was fairly likely
to be a bluff. I had a weekend, but a
hand that beat bluffs, and I had a strong spidey
sense that it was worth a call, and it didn't
call because, like I talked myself out it because the
(06:48):
stakes were pretty high, right, So that's like regret about
like knowing the right play and not doing it. And
the stakes are high, but not so high that I
couldn't like afford to have been wrung by any means, right,
So that was still staying six months later.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It's always those ones that we regret and that we
think about over and over and over.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, trying to avoid regret is something that can drive
our decision making to an irrational degree because it's a
feeling that's not good, right. We don't like feeling regret.
I definitely know that, Like when it comes to poker,
for instance, I always think more about the hands where
I didn't do something that I think I should have
done than when I did something and it didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
So if I, you know, run a bluff and I
end up busting from a tournament, it's fine, right, I
went for it, and I don't really think twice about
it when I think that it's a really good spot
to bluff, and I'm scared, right because what if he
has you know, he calls me and has me beat
and I don't bluff because of that kind of feeling.
(07:53):
That's what I think about him. Like, you know, had
I just gone for it, it might have been very,
very different. It's that inaction rather than the action that
actually motivates me that and stays with me as a
bigger mistake. So I'm curious about what you think about that.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's pretty rare that I bust
out of a tournament on a bluff and regret it.
In fact, it's probably pretty rare in Jeneral that I
bust out on a bluff, right, Like I think I
take bride and having I think like a pretty decent
bluffing frequency, at least relative to people's expectations of me. Right,
I can run small bluff, I can un big bluff.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
I run creed a bluffs.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Right, I probably miss someone like weird boards, right, but
like probably I'm not bluffing enough, if that's the feeling, right,
It's like sometimes I'll really regret like not firing a
second or third barrel.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So what that means if you're not a poker fan
in the audience is like there are basically four streets
in Texas. Hold them so you can actually kind of
bluff at the pot four times, and oftentimes you have
to unload all your ammunition to do it. You're you know,
getting all in probably right. And the times when like
you're like you've got a fire again and there's like
(09:05):
this guilt people can feel like, oh I just had
you know, it's like I just had a greasy burger yesterday.
I have to be very diligent today about like kind
of what I eat and even when it's like evy
to have the cheeseburger again.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Basically, yeah, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
There are so many different facets to this, not just
you know, in the poker world, but in broader decision making.
So if you think about something that's closely related to poker,
you know, the investing world, the finance world. You see
that people are afraid of regretting selling a stock and
then having it go up.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
They fear that more than they.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Regret you know, holding on to it and having it
go down for instance. That's just one example. But you
end up making these irrational decisions all the time because
you don't want to miss out right.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It's kind of this fomo.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's brought to life, and it is compounded with this
fascinating psychological phenomenon called the endowment effect, which is that
when you already have something, it suddenly has much greater
value than it did before you had it.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
So, one famous study is with a lottery ticket. I
give you a lottery ticket and then you know, say
every lottery ticket has an exact same chance of winning,
and they say, hey, nay, do you want to swap
lottery tickets with me? You're going to be irrationally averse
to doing that, because what happens if you swap and
then I end up with the winning ticket? Shit, right,
(10:32):
like that was yours, and you don't think about what
if I had the winning ticket and now you have it, right, Like,
that's just as likely.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
But that's not the way that the human brain works.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Instead, you're like, what if I'm giving up my winning ticket?
When you get something at auction, you're not going to
sell it for more than you bought it for, right,
Like you don't want to part with it. It happens
over and over and over because once it's yours, it
just acquires this irrational value.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So we have these two different things, right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
We have this fomo, We have this fear that like
I'm going to regret what happens, and we have this
endowment effect, and these two things compound each other where
we end up making really irrational choices, especially when it
comes to taking risks, and even if you know this,
this can actually be a really tough one to fight.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And I think poker illustrates.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
That very well because I definitely, you know, still have
those spots where I won't do something, or like, we're
all make an irrational decision even though I know what
I'm doing, And I bet that after we record this,
I am going to still make one of those errors. Right,
And Poker's a game, right, so in a lot of sense,
(11:46):
it should be easier for me to avoid that sort
of regret a version when I'm playing poker.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
When in real life, you know, it's even harder. And
even in poker, I can't avoid it.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Yeah, I mean there's this particular one too that you
get in kind of investing or sports betting for that matter, right,
which is when you investing, yeah, and don't invest enough. Right,
an investment I made six months ago that like, I
think it's a good investment, not a small investment, but
like I could have invested more, and I wish I
had now based on performance of the It's like things
(12:19):
like that can also produce regret. But that reflects hindsight bias.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, absolutely, and hindsight bias definitely comes into play and
regret all the time. It's kind of what I was
saying at the beginning that regret is one of those
emotions that takes outcome into or potential outcome kind of
into its calculus, right, and we shouldn't be doing that.
So one of the things, Natee that you and I
stress over and over is when you're making good decisions,
(12:47):
you can't be outcome oriented, right. You have to separate
yourself from the outcome of the decision. You have to
just think through the process. Right. Am I making this
decision for the correct reasons? Right? Is my expected value
calculation rational? Am I using the correct inputs the correct factors?
Am I waiting them correctly? Am I know calibrating my
(13:09):
confidence levels correctly? Right?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So if you think about the poker hand, like, am
I thinking through? Do I have the right combination? Is
this the right board? Am I in the right situation? Right?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
All of these different things to bluff or to fold
or whatever it is?
Speaker 6 (13:22):
Right?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
So I can't be thinking, well, you know what if
I get called and I bust, right, and yet we
think about that, we end up being way too results
oriented and the regret can kick in after the fact. Right,
So we might have made a rational decision and then
feel regret about it afterwards because it ended up not
(13:44):
going well. Right, Oh, if only I had folded pre flop,
if only I had done this? Like that, that kind
of counterfactual is very hindsight driven, very results driven, and
being results driven and remembering and kind of dwelling on
results is just the polar opposite of what we want
to be doing when we're making good decisions.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
With the exception that like sometimes you pick up additional
information that testifies how accurate your thesis was.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Let's say I'm playing poker and I think this opponent's
we have a dynamic rivals and he's a big calling stations.
So I'm going to make a big all in four
better five bet with pocket aces because I think he'll
call down as light as like ace queen offsuit and
stuff like that. Right, and then they tank and tank
(14:31):
and tank and they barely call with kings or Queen's Right,
then your thesis was wrong.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:37):
That person actually was terrified by you. They probably had
a very strong hand and or you gave something away
physically with the way you played the hand. Right, That's
when you might go back and say I made a
replaced deviation and it didn't work out that.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Well, that's a good caveat That's how we want to
use outcomes, right. We want to use them as a
way of calibrating our decision process in that particular sense,
as opposed to, you know, did it go well for
me or did it go poorly for me?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
So to kind of summarize here, right, More people, more
often than not, are paralyzed by regret or by the
anticipation of future regret, and it makes it make worse
decisions right the time when regret is most appropriate, I think,
or when you knew a decision was bad and you
(15:26):
did it anyway right, then I think you really have
to do some kind of like life coaching, self diagnosis,
professional diagnosed with yourself, or like why that happened?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Right?
Speaker 5 (15:36):
And then the one exception of being results oriented is
when your thesis was wrong, right, and maybe you get
the right outcome anyway, but like subsequent events prove that
your thesis is wrong, and that's you know, again, we
don't have perfect information either. It's not just that there's uncertainty,
it's that we have incomplete information. But sometimes when you
book a win, you forget about it. You can learn
(15:57):
a lot from wins too.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yes, absolutely, And I would wrap this up with one
more thing, which is that we should also remember that
you know, you can regret doing something, but you can
also regret not doing something right. So the choice not
to act, the choice to kind of maintain status quo,
is also a choice that can also lead to a
lot of regret. And both of these things, both what
(16:21):
you're talking about, Nate, and kind of the status quo
by us. These can both lead us to irrational choices
because of the desire to minimize regret.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That's Nate Silver and Maria Khonnikova, hosts of Risky Business.
The lesson I'm getting here is that our fear of
making mistakes can ironically lead us to making some bad choices.
One choice you won't regret is sticking around to hear
the host of Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein talk with Sheila Hetty
about some of the biggest mistakes she's ever made. Welcome
(17:03):
back to this special edition of Cautionary Tales with me,
Tim Harford. Do you know the show Heavyweight? It's another
great one in the Pushkin Network. The host, Jonathan Goldstein
helps people resolve problems from their pasts. Often that means
coming to terms with their own mistakes. If you haven't
heard the show, let me recommend the episode called Gregor.
(17:26):
It's about a man who wants some CDs back and
it sounds mondane I know, but trust me it isn't.
For this special Mistakes episode, Jonathan wanted to talk to
his friend, writer Sheila Hetty, who's probably best known for
her book called Motherhood.
Speaker 6 (17:43):
Sheila, Hi, how are you Yeah? Nice to see you too,
just as a glimpse, for a glimpse behind the curtain.
Before we got on, we were texting a little bit
and you had said, and this is a part of
my gotcha journalism stylings, you'd said that you've never made
a mistake. Well, I was joking. How do you How
(18:07):
do you define a mistake or do you?
Speaker 4 (18:09):
I guess I think a mistake is something that you
did with little thought that if you had put more
thought into it, you would have made a different decision.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
Is there a difference between a regret? You see I
traffic and regrets. That's my lingua franca, that's my bread
and butter, my metia. Is there a difference between a
mistake and a regret?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:33):
I think you can regret anything, mistake or not. I mean,
you can regret things that were even by all accounts,
the best thing you could have done in that situation.
Maybe that's a better way of putting in it.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Do you ever use that button, you know, that button
on the email thing where you could where you could
take back your email? Yes?
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Often, really I wish they left it for about a
minute though. It disappears too fast.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
Yeah, it does. It's almost like it's worthless maybe an hour.
Is there a setting that where you could play with that,
where you can make it like last an hour?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
No, I don't know, well, maybe there is.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
I think though sometimes you want to do things impulsively,
like I sent an email to somebody recently, and then
afterwards I thought why did I send that? But I
think I sent it because if I'd thought about it,
I wouldn't have sent it.
Speaker 6 (19:19):
Was there any particular mistake that came to mind in
thinking about all of these this lifetime and mistakes?
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Yeah, well, I applied for a grant from the Canada
Council and I gave them an old email address and
then they wrote me and there they said, we have
fifty thousand dollars for you. You got the grand And
I only noticed that email because I checked my old
email address. I remembered, oh, I have this old email address,
(19:46):
and I checked it and I had like six emails
for them saying if you don't reply by this date,
we're not giving you the grand. And it was two
months in the past, and I'd lost the money because
I'd given them this old email address, and I thought
I was completely broke. I had no money and I thought,
I just lost fifty thousand dollars because I did this
(20:07):
stupid thing of not fourn my emails to my new
address because I would have had to pay, And at
the time, I thought, why should I pay to forward
my emails from this old address?
Speaker 6 (20:17):
And that was a really that.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Just felt like a heart stopping mistake, Like, how could
I have just lost this money like that?
Speaker 6 (20:27):
Wow, that's that's how long ago? Was this two months ago?
And have you inquired? Have you looked into it?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I called, I emailed. I was like, I'm so sorry.
This is an old the email dress. I don't even
know why I gave this old the email address. It
was I applied so long ago, you know, I didn't
realize da da da da, And then they were able
to give it to me, But if I had checked,
like a week later, they wouldn't have been able to
reverse it. So that was just like, that's a kind
of carelessness, which is common for me to be that careless,
(20:59):
but it's never felt like it would have cost me
such a I mean, the cost of that mistake would
have been much worse than most of the mistakes I'd made,
not aclude emotional mistakes.
Speaker 6 (21:10):
I'm really glad to hear that you were able to
solve it in that space where you thought though that
it was unsolvable and you just lost fifty thousand Canadian dollars.
What was the feeling?
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Shame?
Speaker 6 (21:27):
Just shame, Like was there any attempt towards redemption, like
I'm going to make this into a story or I'm
going to dine out on this story to all my friends.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
No. I was just like I can't even tell my partner,
I can't tell anyone about this, Like this is just
too careless, this is too stupid, this is this has
gone too far, like my carelessness has gone too far,
And I just felt like how can I I was
kind of like a ghast at myself, like I can't
(21:55):
go on living this way with in such a It's
like not reading the instructions. Oh that's another mistake I've
made recently. I was going to do ketamine therapy for
this article that I'm writing, and they said switch the
tetamine around in your mouth and told it there for
fifteen minutes and then spit it out. I'm in this clinic,
and you know, I taped the whole the whole thing,
(22:16):
audio taped the whole thing so I could just transcribe
it later when I said on ketamine and I switched
it around in my mouth for about thirty seconds and
then I swallowed it, and the nurse and the therapist
looked at me like, we told you three times to
swish it around your mouth for fifty minutes and then
spit it out, and I was like, you never said that,
You never said that, And the nurse was gonna say,
(22:38):
lots of people make that mistake, but then she had
to catch herself and then she couldn't say lots of
people made the mistake because everyone had heard that instruction
switch it around for fifty minutes and.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Spit it out.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
And then I listened to the tape when I got home,
and they did say that twice, swish it around your
mouth fifteen minutes and spit out, and I completely didn't
hear it, and they couldn't get me stressed out about it,
because otherwise I'd have this horrible trip. So they're like, oh,
it's okay, it's okay. Oh it's okay, dearie. You know
that you did that. So this is the kind of
like mistake that I make all the time, just like
(23:07):
not listening to instructions, not paying attention, thinking I know everything,
I don't need to listen to the instructions.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Wow. Wow, had anybody ever done that before in the history.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
I don't think if their clinic.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
I mean, it was fine.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
I just had like you just weren't supposed to do that.
That's not how it's supposed to do.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
Do you do you swallow mouthwash after you gargle with it?
Speaker 4 (23:29):
No?
Speaker 6 (23:29):
Okay, But the situation with the with the grant, once
you found out like that, you lost it. Like I
kind of liken that feeling too, when I'm like, say,
carrying a bowl of cereal from the kitchen to the
couch and I feel my I feel like I'm losing
my grasp, it's gonna fall, it's gonna I'm tripping, I'm
(23:52):
time slows down, and I'm just like, fuck it, fuck
it all. And it's almost like a very self punishing
sort of feeling of like you deserve this, I'm going
to really wallow in this, like I practically like throw
the bowl of cereal out of my hands against the
wall to make it as terrible as possible. Is there
a bit of masochism?
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Not in the Grant one, but what you just said
reminds me of a time that I didn't make a mistake,
which I was in some gallery art gallery in Toronto,
and I don't know how this happened, but I had
this feeling like somebody threw me their baby.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
It was like a child.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Like I was on the ground and somebody threw me
this child and I leaned backwards and kind of like
fell backwards to catch it. And I remember thinking, in
that moment, you cannot drop this baby.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
And I didn't, and.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I remember feeling like most situations in life, there is
this margin of who cares if I dropped the cereal
or not.
Speaker 6 (24:46):
And it made me.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Realize that in most situations, I would like, like you
throw the cereal against the wall, and I was just like,
this is not one of those times you have to
put every cell into catching that baby properly, Whereas most
of the time you put half the cells into catching
the baby, or like letting the cereal not fall on
the other half into letting it fall, and you kind
of leave it to chance whether you drop the cereal
(25:08):
or the baby or not. But I was like, this
is not one of those times. And so it did
make me realize like how permissive I am of mistakes
in general, because I was like this, this is not
like all those other times.
Speaker 6 (25:18):
No, this is a great point, but we just need
to rewind a little bit for those who maybe aren't
as into the Canadian conceptual art scene where people walk
into galleries and have babies thrown at them.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
What happened. It was like a social I don't even
know if a show was going on. It was a
bunch of artists hanging around, and how could somebody throw
a baby? It wasn't a baby. It was like a
one year two year old. It was like it was
a somewhere between baby and toddler.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
But they threw They threw a human being at you.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Something happened that I had to catch a child. I
don't really the emotion in trying to catch the child.
The resources that my body put towards catching the child
were so intense, right that I forgot how that situation
actually unfolded. But somehow there was a child. It was
(26:08):
with one person, And then I wish I could explain
it better.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
No, No, I think I'm getting a bit. I mean,
I really like the conclusion, which is sort of like
you realize that mistakes are a luxury sometimes, like if
you just feel like there is no margin for error,
that you can't you just can't allow yourself that, then
you don't.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Yeah, And it's pretty much the only time in my
life where I ever felt like there is no margin forever.
If you don't catch this baby, it'll split its head
open and die. Like I was like, you cannot, And
I think it made me realize how usually I'm like, yeah,
maybe maybe I'll can't catch that mistake, or maybe I
won't maybe I'll let the cereal fall.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
Who cares?
Speaker 4 (26:44):
Like, Yeah, exactly, Like you say, the mistakes are kind
of a luxury.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
Does that suggest that you can avoid mistakes if you
try hard enough?
Speaker 4 (26:54):
I think I think that's what most people would believe.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
How hard do you think you personally? How hard do
you think a person should should try.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I don't I probably don't try that hard because I
figure things will work out.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
In the end. You do feel that way, Yeah, I have.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
A basic optimistic feeling about my life, and I'm basically
an optimistic person. So maybe that's why I don't try
so hard to avoid mistakes, because I figure everything's going
to work out.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
So I swallowed the kind I mean.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Like I had a bit of a hangover the next
day in the day after from it, like I felt
really tired, but like it's I'm not going to die.
Like if I was going to die, they wouldn't have
given it you to swirl in your mouth.
Speaker 6 (27:30):
You know, they have to take into account that people
aren't going to listen all the time and they don't
deserve to die because of it. So how do you
or do you make peace with a mistake?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Just make a new one.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
There's a new season of Heavyweight out now, and you
can find a link to it in this episode show notes. Now,
don't go anywhere. When we get back from the break,
I've got one last cautionary tale for you. Welcome back
to this special edition of Cautionary Tales with me Tim Harford,
(28:18):
and now for what will hopefully be our final mistake.
This episode, I've got a cautionary tail for you. Passengers
on Air Canada flight one four three had the pleasure
of flying on a brand new Boeing seven sixty seven,
albeit a Bowing sixty seven with a brand new dodgy
(28:39):
fuel gauge. The airline knew that the fuel gauge was unreliable,
so Captain Bob Pearson and his crew needed to manually
calculate how much fuel the plane needed to get from
Montreal to Edmonton, plus the usual reserve. Unfortunately, Air Canada,
like Canada itself, was in the slow and confusing process
(29:02):
for switching from imperial to metric units. Most of the
planes were set up and labeled for Imperial measures, but
this new plane wasn't. The upshot of all this confusion
was that the plane was actually fueled up, not with
twenty two thousand, six hundred kilograms of fuel, but with
(29:23):
twenty two thousand, six hundred pounds, less than half of
what was intended. How, how how did this happen? Well,
the manual check didn't use any measure as clear as kilograms. Instead,
the crew needed to convert a dipstick measure in centimeters
(29:44):
into a volume in liters into a mass in kilograms
or pounds. That required a conversion factor. And the conversion
factor supplied to the refuelers and written on all the
older planes was the old one for pounds, not the
new one for kilograms. Did you get that? Air Canada
hadn't made it clear? In any case? Whose job it
was to do all this arithmetic. In the old planes,
(30:05):
it would be the third flight crew member, the flight engineer.
But this new plane just had a pilot and a
co pilot, and neither of them had been trained to
do this tricky task. One mechanical technician tried and gave up.
Another got most of the way through but ran out
a room on the slip of paper he was using.
He decided to leave it to the pilot and co pilot.
(30:28):
Did I mention that neither of them had been trained
to perform the calculation. You might think that this story
was doomed to end in disaster, but this is a
very special story. There's a lucky twist. The plane was
scheduled to make a short hop down to Ottawa to
(30:49):
pick up more passengers before making the long journey west
to Edmonton with a dangerously low level of fuel, and
during that stopover, Captain Pearson, wary of his disconnected fuel gauge,
decided to double check the fuel levels. Phew Alas, there
(31:12):
is an unlucky twist to the lucky twist. In Ottawa,
the flight crew, still untrained and still supplied with confusing
conversion factors, mixed up metric and Imperial units in exactly
the same way. Flight one four to three duly took
(31:33):
off for Edmonton without enough fuel to get it anywhere
near its destination. In the cockpit, the first hint of
trouble came almost halfway to Edmonton. Four short, sharp beeps,
a totally unfamiliar alarm, meaning what left forward fuel pump
(31:58):
had failed? That's odd, Captain Pearson flicked through the manual.
There were six of these pumps, so losing one was
no disaster, except a second pump had failed. Now both
of the left hand fuel tank pumps were out of action.
(32:19):
Oh fuck, said Captain Pearson. He gave the order to
divert to the nearest major airport, Winnipeg. Hopefully at Winnipeg
they could figure out what had gone wrong in the
left hand fuel tank. Winnipeg Center, Air Canada one four to.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Three Air Canada one for three Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yes, sir, we have a problem. Captain Pearson knew that
if there was a problem with the left fuel tank,
the left engine might also fail. Landing with only one
engine it wouldn't be easy. They were one hundred and
twenty eight miles north of Winnipeg. Pearson began a slow descent,
(33:03):
and then four more beeps, and another four and a
moment later, Pearson and his crew realized that all six
fuel pumps had failed. Pearson told the flight crew to
prepare for an emergency landing at Winnipeg. Minutes ticked by.
(33:31):
Captain Pearson and his colleagues still hadn't quite realized how
serious the situation was. They were in the middle of
a gradual descent, but that meant losing height. They would
soon wish they hadn't lost. For the last of those
aggressive four beeps sounded. Number one engine cut out, then
(33:55):
the number two engine, and if you were wandering about
number three engine, there wasn't a number three engine. But
that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it
was when very shortly after afterwards, every light in the
cockpit went out. The electricity in a Boeing seven sixty
(34:16):
seven comes from a generator powered by the engines. Bob
Pearson hadn't just lost his engines, he'd lost all his instruments,
and he'd lost the flaps and slats, the rudder, and
the ailerons, even the undercarriage. Captain Pearson was now in
(34:37):
complete control of the airplane, as long as he didn't
want to speed up, break, change altitude, change direction, stay
airborne or land. There were two glimmers of hope. The
plane was equipped with an emergency air turbine, effectively a
(34:58):
windmill that could be dropped into place near one of
the wheels and use the wind whistling past the fuselage
to supply a little bit of electrical power. The fl
light crew flipped to the manual, found the procedure, and
unlocked the emergency turbine. The lights flickered back on and
(35:18):
Captain Pearson now had some limited control. Most of the
controls no longer work, but by pulling hard on the sticks,
like a driver of a car with power steering disconnected,
Pearson could change the elevation and direction of the plane.
What a shame he didn't have any engines. The co
(35:42):
pilot relayed the news to Winnipeg, asking them to clear
the area and get the emergency crews ready. But it
wasn't clear how the plane would even aim at Winnipeg,
let alone travels sixty five miles to reach it, or
is that one hundred and four kilometers whatever. As Pearson
hastily calculated his rate of dissent. He realized there was
(36:04):
absolutely no way they could glide all the way to Winnipeg,
and the second glimmer, a Boeing seven six seven, might
be a terrible glider that Captain Bob Pearson was an
excellent glider pilot. Gimley Motorsports Park boasts a dragstrip, a
(36:30):
carting track, a motocross track, and a long racetrack. The
racetrack is so long because it used to be a
base for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Air Force
base had closed back in nineteen seventy one, and by
nineteen eighty three it had been a bustling home for
motorsports for more than a decade. On July the twenty third,
(36:51):
nineteen eighty three, Gimbley Motorsports Park was hosting a family
day featuring races on the old runway. The area around
the decommissioned runway was bustling with camper vans, tents and cars.
Children were riding their bikes up and down the tarmac.
None of this, alas was known to the crew of
(37:12):
Air Canada one four to three or to air traffic
control at Winnipeg.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Why would it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
It's not as if the Winnipeg Sports Car Club is
in the habit of sharing their timetable with Air Canada
after all. But up in the cockpit, Captain Pearson's co
pilot had suggested trying to glide in and land on
the old Gimli Air Strip. It wasn't even listed as
(37:40):
a possible landing strip, but the co pilot had been
stationed there as an Air Force officer years before, and
there was nowhere else they could reach. But as the
plane descended towards the air strip, the crew tried to
manually lower and lock the undercarriage with the front wheel
fighting against the wind. They didn't succeed. Swooping out of
(38:05):
the Canadian skies towards the only strip of Concer they
could find a safe landing seemed an almost impossible dream.
The plane was hard to control, very much at risk
of touching down one wingtip or another and flipping into
a fatal cartwheel. It was traveling too fast and there
(38:27):
was no obvious way to slow its descent, and if
they did land, there were no ambulances or fire crews
at the old Gimley Air Force Base. In fact, as
far as Captain Pearson and his team knew, there was
nobody at Gimley at all. It was at about this
point that Pearson noticed three children on bicycles in the
(38:50):
middle of the runway ahead of him. Bicycles or no bicycles.
Pearson was coming in too quickly, and if he couldn't
slow down, everyone in the plane was doomed. He tried
a maneuver that was common enough with gliders but seemed
absurd in a passenger jet, Using all his might to
(39:12):
move the stubborn controls, he used the ailerons on the
wings to steer the plane left, and the rudder to
steer the plane right. A plane's nose pointed left, its
tail stuck out to the right, but the plane itself
kept moving straight forward. It had entered a side slip,
the aerial equivalent of a skid. The stunt dramatically increased
(39:37):
the drag on the plane, which slowed and flocked out
of the sky. The curious thing about a glider is
that it doesn't make a lot of noise. This is
true even if the glider happens to be a Boeing
seven sixty seven. The happy families camping at the far
(40:02):
end of the runway got their first warning that they
were about to have an unusual family day at give
motors Boards Park when they heard a bag and an
unholy scraping sound from down the racetrack. There in the distance,
in a flurry of sparks and a cloud of white smoke,
(40:23):
was a Boeing seven sixty seven. The three boys on
bicycles were pedaling furiously towards them, yelling something indistinct but urgent,
And then a moment later that Boeing seven sixty seven
wasn't in the distance anymore. It was sliding down the
runway towards them, all very very fast. The planes undercarriage
(40:49):
had collapsed, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
The plane stop short, the inflatable slides were deployed. The passengers,
sobbing with relief or stunned into silence, scrambled off the
plane to find themselves the new main attraction of a
(41:12):
family motorsport festival, with carters hurrying up with portable fire extinguishers,
but there wasn't any fuel left to catch fire. Passengers
leaving on the rear slides suffered a painful landing because
the back of the plane was sticking up in an
undignified fashion, and the slides weren't quite long enough. But nobody,
(41:35):
either in the plane or on the ground, suffered serious harm.
But this is cautionary tales. We can't just say they
all lived happily ever after. We need to learn a
lesson from this fiasco, and perhaps it's this organizational memory matters.
(41:57):
Just as British Waterways had long ago forgotten that the
Chesterfield Canal had plugs, Air Canada had forgotten that sometimes
you need to calculate a fuel loads annually. The flight
engineers who once had to do the job no longer existed,
so it was nobody in particular's responsibility to get the
(42:18):
job right, not to mention that the documentation made the
task extremely challenging. Doing a complex piece of arithmetic suddenly
became a matter of life and death, and the crew
had forgotten how to do it. Thank goodness that Captain
Pearson hadn't forgotten how to glide. He managed to get
(42:42):
his malfunctioning passenger aircraft to fly forty miles without fuel,
to touch down within eight hundred feet of the start
of a short six eight hundred foot airstrip, and to
make that touchdown if not gentle, then, shall we say decisive.
(43:04):
Other pilots have been given this scenario to try out
in a flight simulator. The usual result is a catastrophic crash.
(43:24):
There is a whole catalog of cautionary tales full of
epic mistakes that I hope we can all learn from.
And if you're all caught up on those stories, We've
just launched a cautionary Club with bonus episodes every month,
regular updates from me, and a newsletter that includes some
extra curiosities. I hope you'll sign up at patreon dot
(43:45):
com slash Cautionary Club. This episode was written by me,
Tim Harford and produced by Georgia Mills and Isaac Carter,
with help from Marilyn Rust. Thanks also to Nate Silver
and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business, Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight,
and his special guest Sheila Hetty. This episode was edited
(44:10):
by Sarah Nix. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller,
Pushkin. Hello, this is Tim Harford here, host of Cautionary Tales,
the show that tells you stories of catastrophes from the
past and explores what we can learn from them. Today,
our podcast is taking over the Pushkin Network for a
(00:35):
very special episode. I've invited some of the great and
good from Pushkin to join me to give their take
on the nature of mistakes and how we should think
about them. Coming up, Nate Silver and Maria Khonnikova, hosts
of Risky Business, on regretting mistakes and the mistake of regrets.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
You see that people are afraid of regretting selling a
stock and then having it go up.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
They fear that more than they.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Regret, you know, holding on to it and having it
go down.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
And then Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight muses with author Sheila
Hetty about how we should feel about mistakes based on
her experiences with accidental ketamin, missing money, and a flying baby.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
I was on the ground and somebody threw me this child,
and I remember thinking in that moment, you cannot drop
this baby.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
But first, I want to kick things off with a
classic cautionary tale, A strange happening in a canal. It's
(02:02):
nineteen seventy eight, a dredging gang working for British Waterways
a struggling with a stuff problem on the picturesque Chesterfield Canal.
They're trying to strengthen a section of the canal's side wall,
which means dredging away silt and removing submerged junk. That's
(02:22):
not easy at the best of times. But what really
has them stumped is a length of heavy iron chain.
It's blocking their efforts and it simply refuses to budge. Eventually,
the foreman calls in the dredging boat. The crew attaches
a line to the chain and revs up the dredger's engines.
(02:45):
It pulls, and it pulls, and at last that does
the trick. With a sharp tug, the chain finally comes unstuck.
The crew remove it and the block of wood attached
to it, and then take a well earned break for lunch.
(03:08):
Lunch is dudely interrupted by a policeman in a state
of some excitement. He had been passing the normally tranquil
waterway when he could not help but notice a large whirlpool.
By the time the crew returned to the scene, the
canal has gone All that remain are a number of
(03:33):
stranded houseboats and pleasure cruisers, not to mention the dredger
itself wallowing in mud. Those, of course, and a plug hole.
The plug hole had been installed by the designer of
the Chesterfield Canal more than two hundred years earlier, but
(03:53):
all records of it had been destroyed in a wartime
fire in the nineteen forties, since there were no dredging
boats in seventeen seventy five when the canal was opened,
it was designed to be easy to drain in sections
to allow works to jump in and shovel out the
accumulated silt. This particular section was a mile and a
(04:16):
half long, and the entire stretch was now nothing but
mud and the occasional rusted bicycle. The canal itself had
gurgled off to join the nearby river Idol. One of
the workmen explained, we didn't know there was a plug.
(04:41):
I first heard this story from the book that inspired
the Cautionary Tales podcast The World's Greatest Mistakes by Nigel Blundell.
It's full of these kinds of stories that are funny
or tragic or both. I read it when I was
a boy, and decades later It's what inspired me to
start making a podcast about mistakes and what we can
(05:02):
learn from them. So what can we learn from a
vanishing canal? There's the obvious if something really really hard
to move, it might be wiser to leave it in place.
There's another lesson too, but I'll come back to that later.
Before that, it's time to introduce our first guests for
(05:22):
the episode, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova, hosts of the
excellent podcast Risky Business. Nate and Maria are dedicated to
learning from mistakes, and their show is entirely about how
to make better decisions. Nature's a statistician, Maria's a psychologist,
and they're both journalists as well as high stakes poker players.
(05:46):
It's their business to have a keen sense of risk
and reward. When I asked them for some insight about mistakes,
Maria really wanted to talk about the power of one thing,
in particular, regret.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Nate, are there any decisions lately that you didn't make?
An now you're just experiencing a sense of regret, Because
that's what we're going to talk about today, psychology of
regret and how it affects our decision making.
Speaker 3 (06:19):
The things.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
We didn't do the risks, we didn't take the hands,
we did not play, the bluffs, we did not run.
Speaker 5 (06:28):
In Everly, Maria, I started to think about poker hands,
particularly a high stakes poker hand that I played maybe
six months ago, where the short version is like a
player made a bet that I thought was fairly likely
to be a bluff. I had a weekend, but a
hand that beat bluffs, and I had a strong spidey
sense that it was worth a call, and it didn't
call because, like I talked myself out it because the
(06:48):
stakes were pretty high, right, So that's like regret about
like knowing the right play and not doing it. And
the stakes are high, but not so high that I
couldn't like afford to have been wrung by any means, right,
So that was still staying six months later.
Speaker 2 (07:03):
It's always those ones that we regret and that we
think about over and over and over.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Isn't it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, trying to avoid regret is something that can drive
our decision making to an irrational degree because it's a
feeling that's not good, right. We don't like feeling regret.
I definitely know that, Like when it comes to poker,
for instance, I always think more about the hands where
I didn't do something that I think I should have
done than when I did something and it didn't work out.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
Right.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
So if I, you know, run a bluff and I
end up busting from a tournament, it's fine, right, I
went for it, and I don't really think twice about
it when I think that it's a really good spot
to bluff, and I'm scared, right because what if he
has you know, he calls me and has me beat
and I don't bluff because of that kind of feeling.
(07:53):
That's what I think about him. Like, you know, had
I just gone for it, it might have been very,
very different. It's that inaction rather than the action that
actually motivates me that and stays with me as a
bigger mistake. So I'm curious about what you think about that.
Speaker 5 (08:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's it's pretty rare that I bust
out of a tournament on a bluff and regret it.
In fact, it's probably pretty rare in Jeneral that I
bust out on a bluff, right, Like I think I
take bride and having I think like a pretty decent
bluffing frequency, at least relative to people's expectations of me. Right,
I can run small bluff, I can un big bluff.
Speaker 6 (08:29):
I run creed a bluffs.
Speaker 5 (08:30):
Right, I probably miss someone like weird boards, right, but
like probably I'm not bluffing enough, if that's the feeling, right,
It's like sometimes I'll really regret like not firing a
second or third barrel.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Right.
Speaker 5 (08:43):
So what that means if you're not a poker fan
in the audience is like there are basically four streets
in Texas. Hold them so you can actually kind of
bluff at the pot four times, and oftentimes you have
to unload all your ammunition to do it. You're you know,
getting all in probably right. And the times when like
you're like you've got a fire again and there's like
(09:05):
this guilt people can feel like, oh I just had
you know, it's like I just had a greasy burger yesterday.
I have to be very diligent today about like kind
of what I eat and even when it's like evy
to have the cheeseburger again.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Basically, yeah, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 4 (09:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
There are so many different facets to this, not just
you know, in the poker world, but in broader decision making.
So if you think about something that's closely related to poker,
you know, the investing world, the finance world. You see
that people are afraid of regretting selling a stock and
then having it go up.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
They fear that more than they.
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Regret you know, holding on to it and having it
go down for instance. That's just one example. But you
end up making these irrational decisions all the time because
you don't want to miss out right.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
It's kind of this fomo.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
That's brought to life, and it is compounded with this
fascinating psychological phenomenon called the endowment effect, which is that
when you already have something, it suddenly has much greater
value than it did before you had it.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Right.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
So, one famous study is with a lottery ticket. I
give you a lottery ticket and then you know, say
every lottery ticket has an exact same chance of winning,
and they say, hey, nay, do you want to swap
lottery tickets with me? You're going to be irrationally averse
to doing that, because what happens if you swap and
then I end up with the winning ticket? Shit, right,
(10:32):
like that was yours, and you don't think about what
if I had the winning ticket and now you have it, right, Like,
that's just as likely.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
But that's not the way that the human brain works.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
Instead, you're like, what if I'm giving up my winning ticket?
When you get something at auction, you're not going to
sell it for more than you bought it for, right,
Like you don't want to part with it. It happens
over and over and over because once it's yours, it
just acquires this irrational value.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So we have these two different things, right.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
We have this fomo, We have this fear that like
I'm going to regret what happens, and we have this
endowment effect, and these two things compound each other where
we end up making really irrational choices, especially when it
comes to taking risks, and even if you know this,
this can actually be a really tough one to fight.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
And I think poker illustrates.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
That very well because I definitely, you know, still have
those spots where I won't do something, or like, we're
all make an irrational decision even though I know what
I'm doing, And I bet that after we record this,
I am going to still make one of those errors. Right,
And Poker's a game, right, so in a lot of sense,
(11:46):
it should be easier for me to avoid that sort
of regret a version when I'm playing poker.
Speaker 4 (11:51):
But.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
When in real life, you know, it's even harder. And
even in poker, I can't avoid it.
Speaker 5 (11:58):
Yeah, I mean there's this particular one too that you
get in kind of investing or sports betting for that matter, right,
which is when you investing, yeah, and don't invest enough. Right,
an investment I made six months ago that like, I
think it's a good investment, not a small investment, but
like I could have invested more, and I wish I
had now based on performance of the It's like things
(12:19):
like that can also produce regret. But that reflects hindsight bias.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Yeah, absolutely, and hindsight bias definitely comes into play and
regret all the time. It's kind of what I was
saying at the beginning that regret is one of those
emotions that takes outcome into or potential outcome kind of
into its calculus, right, and we shouldn't be doing that.
So one of the things, Natee that you and I
stress over and over is when you're making good decisions,
(12:47):
you can't be outcome oriented, right. You have to separate
yourself from the outcome of the decision. You have to
just think through the process. Right. Am I making this
decision for the correct reasons? Right? Is my expected value
calculation rational? Am I using the correct inputs the correct factors?
Am I waiting them correctly? Am I know calibrating my
(13:09):
confidence levels correctly? Right?
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So if you think about the poker hand, like, am
I thinking through? Do I have the right combination? Is
this the right board? Am I in the right situation? Right?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
All of these different things to bluff or to fold
or whatever it is?
Speaker 6 (13:22):
Right?
Speaker 2 (13:22):
So I can't be thinking, well, you know what if
I get called and I bust, right, and yet we
think about that, we end up being way too results
oriented and the regret can kick in after the fact. Right,
So we might have made a rational decision and then
feel regret about it afterwards because it ended up not
(13:44):
going well. Right, Oh, if only I had folded pre flop,
if only I had done this? Like that, that kind
of counterfactual is very hindsight driven, very results driven, and
being results driven and remembering and kind of dwelling on
results is just the polar opposite of what we want
to be doing when we're making good decisions.
Speaker 5 (14:05):
With the exception that like sometimes you pick up additional
information that testifies how accurate your thesis was.
Speaker 4 (14:10):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Let's say I'm playing poker and I think this opponent's
we have a dynamic rivals and he's a big calling stations.
So I'm going to make a big all in four
better five bet with pocket aces because I think he'll
call down as light as like ace queen offsuit and
stuff like that. Right, and then they tank and tank
(14:31):
and tank and they barely call with kings or Queen's Right,
then your thesis was wrong.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Right.
Speaker 5 (14:37):
That person actually was terrified by you. They probably had
a very strong hand and or you gave something away
physically with the way you played the hand. Right, That's
when you might go back and say I made a
replaced deviation and it didn't work out that.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Well, that's a good caveat That's how we want to
use outcomes, right. We want to use them as a
way of calibrating our decision process in that particular sense,
as opposed to, you know, did it go well for
me or did it go poorly for me?
Speaker 5 (15:05):
So to kind of summarize here, right, More people, more
often than not, are paralyzed by regret or by the
anticipation of future regret, and it makes it make worse
decisions right the time when regret is most appropriate, I think,
or when you knew a decision was bad and you
(15:26):
did it anyway right, then I think you really have
to do some kind of like life coaching, self diagnosis,
professional diagnosed with yourself, or like why that happened?
Speaker 1 (15:35):
Right?
Speaker 5 (15:36):
And then the one exception of being results oriented is
when your thesis was wrong, right, and maybe you get
the right outcome anyway, but like subsequent events prove that
your thesis is wrong, and that's you know, again, we
don't have perfect information either. It's not just that there's uncertainty,
it's that we have incomplete information. But sometimes when you
book a win, you forget about it. You can learn
(15:57):
a lot from wins too.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Yes, absolutely, And I would wrap this up with one
more thing, which is that we should also remember that
you know, you can regret doing something, but you can
also regret not doing something right. So the choice not
to act, the choice to kind of maintain status quo,
is also a choice that can also lead to a
lot of regret. And both of these things, both what
(16:21):
you're talking about, Nate, and kind of the status quo
by us. These can both lead us to irrational choices
because of the desire to minimize regret.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
That's Nate Silver and Maria Khonnikova, hosts of Risky Business.
The lesson I'm getting here is that our fear of
making mistakes can ironically lead us to making some bad choices.
One choice you won't regret is sticking around to hear
the host of Heavyweight, Jonathan Goldstein talk with Sheila Hetty
about some of the biggest mistakes she's ever made. Welcome
(17:03):
back to this special edition of Cautionary Tales with me,
Tim Harford. Do you know the show Heavyweight? It's another
great one in the Pushkin Network. The host, Jonathan Goldstein
helps people resolve problems from their pasts. Often that means
coming to terms with their own mistakes. If you haven't
heard the show, let me recommend the episode called Gregor.
(17:26):
It's about a man who wants some CDs back and
it sounds mondane I know, but trust me it isn't.
For this special Mistakes episode, Jonathan wanted to talk to
his friend, writer Sheila Hetty, who's probably best known for
her book called Motherhood.
Speaker 6 (17:43):
Sheila, Hi, how are you Yeah? Nice to see you too,
just as a glimpse, for a glimpse behind the curtain.
Before we got on, we were texting a little bit
and you had said, and this is a part of
my gotcha journalism stylings, you'd said that you've never made
a mistake. Well, I was joking. How do you How
(18:07):
do you define a mistake or do you?
Speaker 4 (18:09):
I guess I think a mistake is something that you
did with little thought that if you had put more
thought into it, you would have made a different decision.
Speaker 6 (18:22):
Is there a difference between a regret? You see I
traffic and regrets. That's my lingua franca, that's my bread
and butter, my metia. Is there a difference between a
mistake and a regret?
Speaker 3 (18:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (18:33):
I think you can regret anything, mistake or not. I mean,
you can regret things that were even by all accounts,
the best thing you could have done in that situation.
Maybe that's a better way of putting in it.
Speaker 6 (18:45):
Do you ever use that button, you know, that button
on the email thing where you could where you could
take back your email? Yes?
Speaker 4 (18:52):
Often, really I wish they left it for about a
minute though. It disappears too fast.
Speaker 6 (18:57):
Yeah, it does. It's almost like it's worthless maybe an hour.
Is there a setting that where you could play with that,
where you can make it like last an hour?
Speaker 3 (19:06):
No, I don't know, well, maybe there is.
Speaker 4 (19:08):
I think though sometimes you want to do things impulsively,
like I sent an email to somebody recently, and then
afterwards I thought why did I send that? But I
think I sent it because if I'd thought about it,
I wouldn't have sent it.
Speaker 6 (19:19):
Was there any particular mistake that came to mind in
thinking about all of these this lifetime and mistakes?
Speaker 4 (19:26):
Yeah, well, I applied for a grant from the Canada
Council and I gave them an old email address and
then they wrote me and there they said, we have
fifty thousand dollars for you. You got the grand And
I only noticed that email because I checked my old
email address. I remembered, oh, I have this old email address,
(19:46):
and I checked it and I had like six emails
for them saying if you don't reply by this date,
we're not giving you the grand. And it was two
months in the past, and I'd lost the money because
I'd given them this old email address, and I thought
I was completely broke. I had no money and I thought,
I just lost fifty thousand dollars because I did this
(20:07):
stupid thing of not fourn my emails to my new
address because I would have had to pay, And at
the time, I thought, why should I pay to forward
my emails from this old address?
Speaker 6 (20:17):
And that was a really that.
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Just felt like a heart stopping mistake, Like, how could
I have just lost this money like that?
Speaker 6 (20:27):
Wow, that's that's how long ago? Was this two months ago?
And have you inquired? Have you looked into it?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 4 (20:36):
I called, I emailed. I was like, I'm so sorry.
This is an old the email dress. I don't even
know why I gave this old the email address. It
was I applied so long ago, you know, I didn't
realize da da da da, And then they were able
to give it to me, But if I had checked,
like a week later, they wouldn't have been able to
reverse it. So that was just like, that's a kind
of carelessness, which is common for me to be that careless,
(20:59):
but it's never felt like it would have cost me
such a I mean, the cost of that mistake would
have been much worse than most of the mistakes I'd made,
not aclude emotional mistakes.
Speaker 6 (21:10):
I'm really glad to hear that you were able to
solve it in that space where you thought though that
it was unsolvable and you just lost fifty thousand Canadian dollars.
What was the feeling?
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Shame?
Speaker 6 (21:27):
Just shame, Like was there any attempt towards redemption, like
I'm going to make this into a story or I'm
going to dine out on this story to all my friends.
Speaker 4 (21:34):
No. I was just like I can't even tell my partner,
I can't tell anyone about this, Like this is just
too careless, this is too stupid, this is this has
gone too far, like my carelessness has gone too far,
And I just felt like how can I I was
kind of like a ghast at myself, like I can't
(21:55):
go on living this way with in such a It's
like not reading the instructions. Oh that's another mistake I've
made recently. I was going to do ketamine therapy for
this article that I'm writing, and they said switch the
tetamine around in your mouth and told it there for
fifteen minutes and then spit it out. I'm in this clinic,
and you know, I taped the whole the whole thing,
(22:16):
audio taped the whole thing so I could just transcribe
it later when I said on ketamine and I switched
it around in my mouth for about thirty seconds and
then I swallowed it, and the nurse and the therapist
looked at me like, we told you three times to
swish it around your mouth for fifty minutes and then
spit it out, and I was like, you never said that,
You never said that, And the nurse was gonna say,
(22:38):
lots of people make that mistake, but then she had
to catch herself and then she couldn't say lots of
people made the mistake because everyone had heard that instruction
switch it around for fifty minutes and.
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Spit it out.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
And then I listened to the tape when I got home,
and they did say that twice, swish it around your
mouth fifteen minutes and spit out, and I completely didn't
hear it, and they couldn't get me stressed out about it,
because otherwise I'd have this horrible trip. So they're like, oh,
it's okay, it's okay. Oh it's okay, dearie. You know
that you did that. So this is the kind of
like mistake that I make all the time, just like
(23:07):
not listening to instructions, not paying attention, thinking I know everything,
I don't need to listen to the instructions.
Speaker 6 (23:14):
Wow. Wow, had anybody ever done that before in the history.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
I don't think if their clinic.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
I mean, it was fine.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
I just had like you just weren't supposed to do that.
That's not how it's supposed to do.
Speaker 6 (23:25):
Do you do you swallow mouthwash after you gargle with it?
Speaker 4 (23:29):
No?
Speaker 6 (23:29):
Okay, But the situation with the with the grant, once
you found out like that, you lost it. Like I
kind of liken that feeling too, when I'm like, say,
carrying a bowl of cereal from the kitchen to the
couch and I feel my I feel like I'm losing
my grasp, it's gonna fall, it's gonna I'm tripping, I'm
(23:52):
time slows down, and I'm just like, fuck it, fuck
it all. And it's almost like a very self punishing
sort of feeling of like you deserve this, I'm going
to really wallow in this, like I practically like throw
the bowl of cereal out of my hands against the
wall to make it as terrible as possible. Is there
a bit of masochism?
Speaker 4 (24:13):
Not in the Grant one, but what you just said
reminds me of a time that I didn't make a mistake,
which I was in some gallery art gallery in Toronto,
and I don't know how this happened, but I had
this feeling like somebody threw me their baby.
Speaker 6 (24:25):
It was like a child.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Like I was on the ground and somebody threw me
this child and I leaned backwards and kind of like
fell backwards to catch it. And I remember thinking, in
that moment, you cannot drop this baby.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
And I didn't, and.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
I remember feeling like most situations in life, there is
this margin of who cares if I dropped the cereal
or not.
Speaker 6 (24:46):
And it made me.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
Realize that in most situations, I would like, like you
throw the cereal against the wall, and I was just like,
this is not one of those times you have to
put every cell into catching that baby properly, Whereas most
of the time you put half the cells into catching
the baby, or like letting the cereal not fall on
the other half into letting it fall, and you kind
of leave it to chance whether you drop the cereal
(25:08):
or the baby or not. But I was like, this
is not one of those times. And so it did
make me realize like how permissive I am of mistakes
in general, because I was like this, this is not
like all those other times.
Speaker 6 (25:18):
No, this is a great point, but we just need
to rewind a little bit for those who maybe aren't
as into the Canadian conceptual art scene where people walk
into galleries and have babies thrown at them.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
What happened. It was like a social I don't even
know if a show was going on. It was a
bunch of artists hanging around, and how could somebody throw
a baby? It wasn't a baby. It was like a
one year two year old. It was like it was
a somewhere between baby and toddler.
Speaker 6 (25:43):
But they threw They threw a human being at you.
Speaker 4 (25:46):
Something happened that I had to catch a child. I
don't really the emotion in trying to catch the child.
The resources that my body put towards catching the child
were so intense, right that I forgot how that situation
actually unfolded. But somehow there was a child. It was
(26:08):
with one person, And then I wish I could explain
it better.
Speaker 6 (26:12):
No, No, I think I'm getting a bit. I mean,
I really like the conclusion, which is sort of like
you realize that mistakes are a luxury sometimes, like if
you just feel like there is no margin for error,
that you can't you just can't allow yourself that, then
you don't.
Speaker 4 (26:27):
Yeah, And it's pretty much the only time in my
life where I ever felt like there is no margin forever.
If you don't catch this baby, it'll split its head
open and die. Like I was like, you cannot, And
I think it made me realize how usually I'm like, yeah,
maybe maybe I'll can't catch that mistake, or maybe I
won't maybe I'll let the cereal fall.
Speaker 6 (26:43):
Who cares?
Speaker 4 (26:44):
Like, Yeah, exactly, Like you say, the mistakes are kind
of a luxury.
Speaker 6 (26:50):
Does that suggest that you can avoid mistakes if you
try hard enough?
Speaker 4 (26:54):
I think I think that's what most people would believe.
Speaker 6 (26:57):
How hard do you think you personally? How hard do
you think a person should should try.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
I don't I probably don't try that hard because I
figure things will work out.
Speaker 6 (27:06):
In the end. You do feel that way, Yeah, I have.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
A basic optimistic feeling about my life, and I'm basically
an optimistic person. So maybe that's why I don't try
so hard to avoid mistakes, because I figure everything's going
to work out.
Speaker 3 (27:19):
So I swallowed the kind I mean.
Speaker 4 (27:20):
Like I had a bit of a hangover the next
day in the day after from it, like I felt
really tired, but like it's I'm not going to die.
Like if I was going to die, they wouldn't have
given it you to swirl in your mouth.
Speaker 6 (27:30):
You know, they have to take into account that people
aren't going to listen all the time and they don't
deserve to die because of it. So how do you
or do you make peace with a mistake?
Speaker 4 (27:47):
Just make a new one.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
There's a new season of Heavyweight out now, and you
can find a link to it in this episode show notes. Now,
don't go anywhere. When we get back from the break,
I've got one last cautionary tale for you. Welcome back
to this special edition of Cautionary Tales with me Tim Harford,
(28:18):
and now for what will hopefully be our final mistake.
This episode, I've got a cautionary tail for you. Passengers
on Air Canada flight one four three had the pleasure
of flying on a brand new Boeing seven sixty seven,
albeit a Bowing sixty seven with a brand new dodgy
(28:39):
fuel gauge. The airline knew that the fuel gauge was unreliable,
so Captain Bob Pearson and his crew needed to manually
calculate how much fuel the plane needed to get from
Montreal to Edmonton, plus the usual reserve. Unfortunately, Air Canada,
like Canada itself, was in the slow and confusing process
(29:02):
for switching from imperial to metric units. Most of the
planes were set up and labeled for Imperial measures, but
this new plane wasn't. The upshot of all this confusion
was that the plane was actually fueled up, not with
twenty two thousand, six hundred kilograms of fuel, but with
(29:23):
twenty two thousand, six hundred pounds, less than half of
what was intended. How, how how did this happen? Well,
the manual check didn't use any measure as clear as kilograms. Instead,
the crew needed to convert a dipstick measure in centimeters
(29:44):
into a volume in liters into a mass in kilograms
or pounds. That required a conversion factor. And the conversion
factor supplied to the refuelers and written on all the
older planes was the old one for pounds, not the
new one for kilograms. Did you get that? Air Canada
hadn't made it clear? In any case? Whose job it
was to do all this arithmetic. In the old planes,
(30:05):
it would be the third flight crew member, the flight engineer.
But this new plane just had a pilot and a
co pilot, and neither of them had been trained to
do this tricky task. One mechanical technician tried and gave up.
Another got most of the way through but ran out
a room on the slip of paper he was using.
He decided to leave it to the pilot and co pilot.
(30:28):
Did I mention that neither of them had been trained
to perform the calculation. You might think that this story
was doomed to end in disaster, but this is a
very special story. There's a lucky twist. The plane was
scheduled to make a short hop down to Ottawa to
(30:49):
pick up more passengers before making the long journey west
to Edmonton with a dangerously low level of fuel, and
during that stopover, Captain Pearson, wary of his disconnected fuel gauge,
decided to double check the fuel levels. Phew Alas, there
(31:12):
is an unlucky twist to the lucky twist. In Ottawa,
the flight crew, still untrained and still supplied with confusing
conversion factors, mixed up metric and Imperial units in exactly
the same way. Flight one four to three duly took
(31:33):
off for Edmonton without enough fuel to get it anywhere
near its destination. In the cockpit, the first hint of
trouble came almost halfway to Edmonton. Four short, sharp beeps,
a totally unfamiliar alarm, meaning what left forward fuel pump
(31:58):
had failed? That's odd, Captain Pearson flicked through the manual.
There were six of these pumps, so losing one was
no disaster, except a second pump had failed. Now both
of the left hand fuel tank pumps were out of action.
(32:19):
Oh fuck, said Captain Pearson. He gave the order to
divert to the nearest major airport, Winnipeg. Hopefully at Winnipeg
they could figure out what had gone wrong in the
left hand fuel tank. Winnipeg Center, Air Canada one four to.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Three Air Canada one for three Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yes, sir, we have a problem. Captain Pearson knew that
if there was a problem with the left fuel tank,
the left engine might also fail. Landing with only one
engine it wouldn't be easy. They were one hundred and
twenty eight miles north of Winnipeg. Pearson began a slow descent,
(33:03):
and then four more beeps, and another four and a
moment later, Pearson and his crew realized that all six
fuel pumps had failed. Pearson told the flight crew to
prepare for an emergency landing at Winnipeg. Minutes ticked by.
(33:31):
Captain Pearson and his colleagues still hadn't quite realized how
serious the situation was. They were in the middle of
a gradual descent, but that meant losing height. They would
soon wish they hadn't lost. For the last of those
aggressive four beeps sounded. Number one engine cut out, then
(33:55):
the number two engine, and if you were wandering about
number three engine, there wasn't a number three engine. But
that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it
was when very shortly after afterwards, every light in the
cockpit went out. The electricity in a Boeing seven sixty
(34:16):
seven comes from a generator powered by the engines. Bob
Pearson hadn't just lost his engines, he'd lost all his instruments,
and he'd lost the flaps and slats, the rudder, and
the ailerons, even the undercarriage. Captain Pearson was now in
(34:37):
complete control of the airplane, as long as he didn't
want to speed up, break, change altitude, change direction, stay
airborne or land. There were two glimmers of hope. The
plane was equipped with an emergency air turbine, effectively a
(34:58):
windmill that could be dropped into place near one of
the wheels and use the wind whistling past the fuselage
to supply a little bit of electrical power. The fl
light crew flipped to the manual, found the procedure, and
unlocked the emergency turbine. The lights flickered back on and
(35:18):
Captain Pearson now had some limited control. Most of the
controls no longer work, but by pulling hard on the sticks,
like a driver of a car with power steering disconnected,
Pearson could change the elevation and direction of the plane.
What a shame he didn't have any engines. The co
(35:42):
pilot relayed the news to Winnipeg, asking them to clear
the area and get the emergency crews ready. But it
wasn't clear how the plane would even aim at Winnipeg,
let alone travels sixty five miles to reach it, or
is that one hundred and four kilometers whatever. As Pearson
hastily calculated his rate of dissent. He realized there was
(36:04):
absolutely no way they could glide all the way to Winnipeg,
and the second glimmer, a Boeing seven six seven, might
be a terrible glider that Captain Bob Pearson was an
excellent glider pilot. Gimley Motorsports Park boasts a dragstrip, a
(36:30):
carting track, a motocross track, and a long racetrack. The
racetrack is so long because it used to be a
base for the Royal Canadian Air Force. The Air Force
base had closed back in nineteen seventy one, and by
nineteen eighty three it had been a bustling home for
motorsports for more than a decade. On July the twenty third,
(36:51):
nineteen eighty three, Gimbley Motorsports Park was hosting a family
day featuring races on the old runway. The area around
the decommissioned runway was bustling with camper vans, tents and cars.
Children were riding their bikes up and down the tarmac.
None of this, alas was known to the crew of
(37:12):
Air Canada one four to three or to air traffic
control at Winnipeg.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
Why would it.
Speaker 1 (37:18):
It's not as if the Winnipeg Sports Car Club is
in the habit of sharing their timetable with Air Canada
after all. But up in the cockpit, Captain Pearson's co
pilot had suggested trying to glide in and land on
the old Gimli Air Strip. It wasn't even listed as
(37:40):
a possible landing strip, but the co pilot had been
stationed there as an Air Force officer years before, and
there was nowhere else they could reach. But as the
plane descended towards the air strip, the crew tried to
manually lower and lock the undercarriage with the front wheel
fighting against the wind. They didn't succeed. Swooping out of
(38:05):
the Canadian skies towards the only strip of Concer they
could find a safe landing seemed an almost impossible dream.
The plane was hard to control, very much at risk
of touching down one wingtip or another and flipping into
a fatal cartwheel. It was traveling too fast and there
(38:27):
was no obvious way to slow its descent, and if
they did land, there were no ambulances or fire crews
at the old Gimley Air Force Base. In fact, as
far as Captain Pearson and his team knew, there was
nobody at Gimley at all. It was at about this
point that Pearson noticed three children on bicycles in the
(38:50):
middle of the runway ahead of him. Bicycles or no bicycles.
Pearson was coming in too quickly, and if he couldn't
slow down, everyone in the plane was doomed. He tried
a maneuver that was common enough with gliders but seemed
absurd in a passenger jet, Using all his might to
(39:12):
move the stubborn controls, he used the ailerons on the
wings to steer the plane left, and the rudder to
steer the plane right. A plane's nose pointed left, its
tail stuck out to the right, but the plane itself
kept moving straight forward. It had entered a side slip,
the aerial equivalent of a skid. The stunt dramatically increased
(39:37):
the drag on the plane, which slowed and flocked out
of the sky. The curious thing about a glider is
that it doesn't make a lot of noise. This is
true even if the glider happens to be a Boeing
seven sixty seven. The happy families camping at the far
(40:02):
end of the runway got their first warning that they
were about to have an unusual family day at give
motors Boards Park when they heard a bag and an
unholy scraping sound from down the racetrack. There in the distance,
in a flurry of sparks and a cloud of white smoke,
(40:23):
was a Boeing seven sixty seven. The three boys on
bicycles were pedaling furiously towards them, yelling something indistinct but urgent,
And then a moment later that Boeing seven sixty seven
wasn't in the distance anymore. It was sliding down the
runway towards them, all very very fast. The planes undercarriage
(40:49):
had collapsed, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
The plane stop short, the inflatable slides were deployed. The passengers,
sobbing with relief or stunned into silence, scrambled off the
plane to find themselves the new main attraction of a
(41:12):
family motorsport festival, with carters hurrying up with portable fire extinguishers,
but there wasn't any fuel left to catch fire. Passengers
leaving on the rear slides suffered a painful landing because
the back of the plane was sticking up in an
undignified fashion, and the slides weren't quite long enough. But nobody,
(41:35):
either in the plane or on the ground, suffered serious harm.
But this is cautionary tales. We can't just say they
all lived happily ever after. We need to learn a
lesson from this fiasco, and perhaps it's this organizational memory matters.
(41:57):
Just as British Waterways had long ago forgotten that the
Chesterfield Canal had plugs, Air Canada had forgotten that sometimes
you need to calculate a fuel loads annually. The flight
engineers who once had to do the job no longer existed,
so it was nobody in particular's responsibility to get the
(42:18):
job right, not to mention that the documentation made the
task extremely challenging. Doing a complex piece of arithmetic suddenly
became a matter of life and death, and the crew
had forgotten how to do it. Thank goodness that Captain
Pearson hadn't forgotten how to glide. He managed to get
(42:42):
his malfunctioning passenger aircraft to fly forty miles without fuel,
to touch down within eight hundred feet of the start
of a short six eight hundred foot airstrip, and to
make that touchdown if not gentle, then, shall we say decisive.
(43:04):
Other pilots have been given this scenario to try out
in a flight simulator. The usual result is a catastrophic crash.
(43:24):
There is a whole catalog of cautionary tales full of
epic mistakes that I hope we can all learn from.
And if you're all caught up on those stories, We've
just launched a cautionary Club with bonus episodes every month,
regular updates from me, and a newsletter that includes some
extra curiosities. I hope you'll sign up at patreon dot
(43:45):
com slash Cautionary Club. This episode was written by me,
Tim Harford and produced by Georgia Mills and Isaac Carter,
with help from Marilyn Rust. Thanks also to Nate Silver
and Maria Konnikova from Risky Business, Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight,
and his special guest Sheila Hetty. This episode was edited
(44:10):
by Sarah Nix. The sound design and original music are
the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohne,
Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller,
Host
Tim Harford
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