There's an interesting (and long) article at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/06/13/the_bright_side_of_wrong/about how inductive reasoning - seeing patterns, putting things together - both makes humans smart and makes us prone to errors. A good concept to have in mind thinking about a challenging Junior or Senior year making sense of chemistry and other good stuff. A quote for you from the 4-page article:
As ashamed as we may feel of our mistakes, they are not a byproduct of all that's worst about being human. On the contrary: They're a byproduct of all that's best about us. We don't get things wrong because we are uninformed and lazy and stupid and evil. We get things wrong because we get things right. The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to err is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent.
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I just finished three weeks at the University of Maryland, taking a class called Biopharmaceutical Engineering and Production. This article reminds me of some of the things I learned in this class.
Large pharmaceutical companies such as Human Genome Sciences and Glaxo Smith Kline recognize that human error is inevitable, and they also know that even the smallest mistake, like forgetting one 2 at the end of a lot number, can cause an entire batch to be thrown out and millions of dollars to be lost. In order to avoid errors such as this, every task is completed in pairs. One person will perform the task while the other watches and then both workers will initial and date the batch production record. This system is relatively effective at preventing human error.
Another thing that this article reminded me of from my class is that in the production of pharmaceuticals, according to GDP(good documentation practices), all written mistakes must be crossed out with one line, dated and initialed. This way mistakes are not erased or blacked out, but still visible so that everyone can learn from them.
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