Should Government Be Wrong Half the Time?

Post at Google Operating System on their failures (e.g., they just dropped Wave).

Google's Peter Norvig has a more detailed explanation for this attitude:

"If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be."

Makes sense to me, although I must admit as a supervisor I wasn't happy about any failures. The distinction is between learning and executing; it's good to fail while learning, but when you say you have the answer, you'd better have the answer.  That may also tie into the free market--it's good for learning, but government can compete when the learning is done.

[I know, some anti-government wiseacre thought to herself when she read my title: if the government was wrong only half the time, it would be an improvement.]