Unit 14 To Err Is Human
Everyone must have had at least one personal experience with a computer error by this time. Bank balances are suddenly reported to have jumped from $379 into the millions, appeals for charitable contributions are mailed over and over to people with crazy-sounding names at your address, department stores send the wrong bills, utility companies write that they’re turning everything off, that sort of thing. If you manage to get in touch with someone and complain, you then get instantaneously typed, guilty letters from the same computer, saying,”Our computer was in error, and an adjustment is being made in your account.”
如今，几乎每个人都经历过电脑出错带来的麻烦。银行通知的贷款余额忽然从379美元飞涨至数百万美元；呼吁给那些名字听起来稀奇古怪的人进行慈善捐助的信件三番五次地寄往你的地址；部门商店发送错误的账单；公共事业公司说他们将要关闭供给，诸如此类。如果你打印了，同一台电脑出来的致歉信上写道：“我们的电脑出现了错误，正在调整您的账目。”
These are supposed to be the sheerest, blindest accidents. Mistakes are not believed to be part of the normal behavior of a good machine. If things go wrong, it must be a personal, human error, the result of fingering, tampering, a button getting stuck, someone hitting the wrong key. The computer, at its normal best, is infallible.
这些意外事故纯粹是无意识的过错。人们认为，出错不是一个性能良好的机器的正常行为。如果出了错，那一定是人为的错误，如指法错误，乱碰键盘，按键失灵，按错了键。最佳正常工作状态下的电脑是不会出差错的。
I wonder whether this can be true. After all, the whole point of computers is that they represent an extension of the human brain, vastly improved upon but nonetheless human, superhuman maybe. A good computer can think clearly and quickly enough to beat you at chess, and some of them have even programmed to write obscure verse. They can do anything we can do, and more besides.
我想知道这会是真的么。毕竟，电脑的本质是人脑的延伸，在此之上大为提升，但仍具有人性的特点，或许说具有超人类的特征。好的电脑可以足够清晰快速地思考，在下棋中打败你。它们有些甚至可以被编程写朦胧诗。它们能做任何我们能做的事，更多的是我们做不了的。
It is not yet known whether a computer has its own consciousness, and it would be hard to find out about this. When you walk into one of those great halls now built for the huge machines, and stand listening, it is easy to imagine that the faint, distant noises are the sound of thinking, and the turning of the spools gives them the look of wild creatures rolling their eyes in the effort to concentrate, choking with information. But real thinking, and dreaming, are other matters.
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电脑是否有它自己的意识还未可知，也很难到答案。当你走进那些现在建来放巨大机器的大厅其中的一间，站着听，很容易把微弱遥远的声响想象成思考的声音，转轴的转动让它们看起来像野兽转动它们的眼睛，试图努力集中，因为信息而拥塞。但是真正的思考和做梦，又是另一回事。
On the other hand, the evidences of something like an unconscious, equivalent to ours, are all around, in every mail. As extensions of the human brain, they have been constructed with the same property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.
另一方面，每条信息里都有一种无意识的相当于我们人脑的东西存在的证据随处可见。作为人脑延伸的电脑，其构造同样具有出错的特性，自发的、不受控制的，各种可能性都有。
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think out way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in life this way. We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
出错是人类思维所固有的，扎根于人脑之中，像根瘤一样维持着脑组织。假如不从犯错中有所收获，我们也许无法做成任何有用的事。我们考虑事情时需在正误之间做出选择，而
且错误的选择通常同正确的一样多。我们的生活之路就是这样，注定会犯错误，为错误编码。
We learn, as we say, by “trial and error.” Why do we always say that? Why not “trial and rightness” or “trial and triumph”? The old phrase puts it that way because that is, in real life, the way it is done.
正如我们自己所说，我们通过“尝试—出错”。为什么我们总这样说呢？而不是“尝试—正确”或者是“尝试—成功”？这句老话之所以这么说是因为现实生活就是这样。
A good laboratory, like a good bank or a corporation or government, has to run like a computer. Almost everything is done flawlessly, by the book, and all the numbers add up to the predicted sums. The days go by. And then, if it is a lucky day, and a lucky laboratory, somebody makes a mistake: the wrong buffer, something in one of the blanks, a decimal misplaced in reading counts, the warm room off by a degree and a half, a mouse out of his box, or just a misreading of the day’s protocol. Whatever, when the results come in, something is obviously screwed up, and then the action can begin.
好的实验室，正如好的银行或者政府，必须像电脑一样运行。几乎每件事都得做到循规蹈矩、完美无缺，所有的数字累加起来需达到预计的数目。十年如一日。然而，在某个幸运的一天，一个幸运的实验室，有个人犯了个错误：缓存器坏了，一个空白表格被填写内容，读数中的小数点点错，温室降温1.5度，
鼠标出了故障或者是当天的试验报告数据的错读。无论什么原因，当结果出来时，显然有什么地方出毛病了，于是，新的探索行动便开始了。
The misreading is not the important error; it opens the way. The next step is the crucial one. If the investigator can bring himself to say,” But even so, look at that!”then the new finding, whatever it is, is ready for snatching. What is needed, for progress to be made, is the move based on the error.
数据错读并不是重大错误，它打开了探索之门。下一步至关重要。如果调研者能意识到：“及时错了，也要弄个明白。”那么，就会有这样或那样新的发现。我们需要的就是在错误中汲取教训，以求进步。
Whenever new kinds of thinking are about to be accomplished, or new varieties of music, there has to be an argument beforehand. With two sides debating in the same mind, haranguing, there is an amiable understanding that one is right and the other is wrong. Sooner or later the thing is settled, but there can be no action at all if there are not the two sides, and the argument. The hope is in the faculty of wrongness, the tendency toward error. The capacity to leap across mountains of information to land lightly on the wrong side represents the highest of human endowments.
新的思路、新的音乐类型，即将面世前总会引发争论。当有理智的双方在一起争辩、高谈阔论时，都能友好地理解这一点：一方正确，另一方错误。问题迟早会被解决，但如果没有双方和争辩，就不会有进
展。人们会犯错误的倾向正是希望之所在。越过了大量的信息后，轻易得出错误结论的能力，恰恰体现了人类的最高天资。
It may be that this is a uniquely human gift, perhaps even stipulated in our genetic instructions. Other creatures do not seem to have DNA sequences for making mistakes as a routine part of daily living, certainly not for programmed error as a guide for action.
这可能是人类的一种独特的天赋，甚至也许由我们的遗传指令所规定。其他的生物似乎不具备在日常生活中总是犯错的DNA成分，当然也就不可能有意识地采取错误的行动。
We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground. This process is called exploration and is based on human fallibility. If we had only a single center in our brains, capable of responding only when a correct decision was to be made, instead of the jumble of different, credulous, easily conned clusters of neurons that provide for being flung off into blind alleys, up trees, down dead ends, out into blue sky, along wrong turnings, around bends, we
could only stay the way are today, stuck fast.
当存在两种以上的选择时，我们人类思维最活跃并尽量做出最佳选择。有时，有十种选择，甚至有二十种不同的方法可供选择，其中只有一种方法是对的，其余注定都是错误的。然而正是这种大量的可选择性使我们能够从一个全新的高度考虑事情。这个过程被称为基于人类犯错的探索。如果人类的大脑只有一个中心，只能在要作出正确的决定时才能反应，而不是像一团乱麻似的把不同的、糊涂的、轻信的的神经元组织在一起，这些神经元网络会使我们的思路好像一会儿进入绝境，一会儿跳到树上，一会儿又掉进死胡同，然而又飞入一片蓝天，兜着错误的圈子，在拐角处徘徊，那么，我们只会呆在原地，静止不动。
The lower animals do not have this splendid freedom. They are limited, most of them, to absolute infallibility. Cats, for all their good side, never make mistakes. I have never seen a maladroit, clumsy, or blundering cat. Dogs are sometimes fallible, occasionally able to make charming minor mistakes, but they get this way by trying to mimic their masters. Fish are flawless in everything they do. Individual cells in a tissue are mindless machines, perfect in their performance, as absolutely inhuman as bees.
低等点的动物不具有这种非凡的自由。它们中大多数，被无错误所限制。就其好的一面来说，猫是从不犯错的。我从来没见过一个不机敏的、笨拙的或者浮躁的猫。狗时常是易犯错的，偶尔会犯些可爱的小错误，但也是模仿主人时学到的。鱼做的每件事都是完美的。组织中的每个细胞是无意识的机器，表现是完美的，像蜜蜂一样绝对无人性。