Trial and Error: It's Interesting Because It's Messy and Chaotic - A Playful Essay on Words

When we hit a wall in our work or lives, we use the term "trial and error" like a get-out-of-jail-free card. In fact, if you trace its origins, this term didn't start with humans, but with a panicked cat.

In the business world, it's often discussed in cool-sounding contexts like,
"Let's repeat trial and error to innovate..."
But take a close look at the kanji characters. Don't you feel a sense of unease drifting from them?

The character "shi" (試) is written with the speech radical and the character for "style," meaning to test something by fitting it into a mold. So far, it's smart. It even feels like an honor student. The latter two characters, however, are not so pleasant. "Saku" (錯) is written with the metal radical and the character for "past." This kanji for "past" originally depicted dried meat crossed and stacked, meaning "intermingled" or "cluttered." Furthermore, "go" (誤) derived its meaning of "going crazy" from the image of a body shaking and making a commotion.

In other words, if you decode "trial and error" (shikousakugo) literally, it describes a disastrous scene where:
"I tried to test things smartly, but metal and everything else got scattered and turned into a huge commotion."
It means that a big mess is promised from the very beginning at the level of the kanji's formation.

The fact that it will be a big mess from the start is guaranteed at the level of the kanji's etymology.

The roots of this term go back to a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Edward Thorndike at the end of the 19th century.
A hungry cat was locked in a box with an escape button. The cat had no intention of pressing the button smartly. It rampaged, scratched, and panicked inside the box. After all that wasted movement, its paw accidentally touched the button, and the door opened.

This is the beginning of "Trial and Error," or "trial-and-error learning."

Try to imagine the cat rampaging.
There is no dignity in it whatsoever. However, the way we sit at our desks holding our heads, rewriting code, and throwing presentation materials into the trash over and over is exactly the same as the cat in the box 100 years ago.

When this psychological term entered Japan during the Meiji era, our predecessors came up with a brilliant translation.
However, as time went on, this term began to be consumed in the business districts of the Showa era as "guts theory" or the "virtue of gritty effort."
It was burdened with a somewhat heavy, athletic-club-like pressure to "not give up even if you fail."

However, in the IT era, the wind has changed a little.
In the world of system development, the appearance of errors (mistakes) is not a failure, but rather called "debugging" or "specification verification." Based on the premise that you can't write perfect code from the start, you run tests repeatedly in short cycles. Methods like Agile and prototyping might be considered the modern technological embodiment of the "cat in the box."

The term has changed its form from a "psychological experiment" to "gritty guts theory," and finally to "system procedures."

If you are feeling down right now because you made a massive bug at work or a project has been sent back to square one, I want you to rethink it for a moment.

There is actually no such thing as a challenge without "error" in this world. If it goes well from the start, it's not a "trial," it's just "known work." Only after we fail, get messy, hold our heads, and run around in circles can we truly benefit from the term "trial and error."

Perhaps "error" is the main event, and "trial" is just an extra that follows later.

If you make a mistake at work and report it to your boss, try whispering this to yourself in your heart:

"I'm sorry, I have thoroughly erred."

You should be allowed to be a little proud of yourself for making a proper mess.
Until the very moment we escape from the box, we should be free to run around in a panic like a cat, with our heads held high.