-- Any notion of what is a "soft" fail is exeeedingly dependent
on context.
-- Some fails are so soft that we don't necessarily think of
them as fails.
The softest failure of all is the /averted/ failure.
1) Every year in the northern hemisphere there is a large-scale
natural disaster. It's called "winter". Millions upon millions
of people would die each winter, due to exposure and starvation
... except that we have devices and procedures to mitigate the
disaster.
-- We have houses, with insulation in the walls.
-- We have warm fuzzy clothing.
-- We have an elaborate system for stockpiling and distributing
fuel.
-- We have an elaborate system for stockpiling and distributing
food.
-- et cetera.
This is something most students can relate to. It illustrates
the larger point that soft fails don't happen as the result of
miracles. They happen because people went to a lot of trouble
to arrange for them.
2) If you're getting dressed and you find that your sock has a
huge hole in it, in the short run you just grab a different
pair of socks, and in the longer run you buy some new ones.
Note that this definitely counts as a failure, and if you
were in the middle of a long hike (or an infantry march) a
sock failure could literally be life-threatening. However,
it's a failure that we know how to deal with.
This illustrates why it is so scandalously toxic when students
are trained, year after year, that "the scientific method"
requires getting invested in a single, specific guess. https://www.av8n.com/physics/scientific-methods.htm#sec-poster
The more specificity the worse, and the more investment the
worse. Instead one should be prepared for all the various
/things that could happen/.
3) Ditching a crippled Airbus in the Hudson is another example.
This is harder for students to relate to, and it is a bit more
complicated than changing your socks, but still the story is
worth telling.
The outcome is *not* a miracle. It results from a bunch of people
who are good at their jobs doing their jobs. Those who think of
it as a miracle will learn all the wrong lessons. Calling it a
miracle is an insult to all the engineers, flight instructors,
flight crews, government officials, etc. who put years of effort
into finding ways to turn potential disasters into soft fails.
4) This is probably not directly useful for class discussion,
because it requires too much domain knowledge, but it might
make a nice topic for a research report for a good student:
If you read the transcript of the Apollo 11 descent and landing
on the moon, the final words are:
Armstrong: Houston, Tranquility Base here. The eagle has landed.
Duke (CAPCOM): Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground.
You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.
We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.
Non-experts are always puzzled by CAPCOM's remark. It seems
like a non-sequitur. The transcript up to that point sounds
very dry, like business as usual.
HOWEVER, my point is that anybody who knew what was going on
would be absolutely terrified. There were about five things
going wrong at once. They /narrowly/ averted epic failure
several times over, all at once.
Again the lesson is: The outcome was not a miracle. It was the
result of a bunch of people who were awesomely good at their jobs
doing their jobs.
We can discuss the details if anybody is interested.
5) The following must be considered an obligatory reference:
George Pólya,
_How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method_
1st edition (1945), 2nd edition (1957), Princeton University Press
Pólya introduced the word "heuristic" into the scientific language.
He makes the point:
Try /something/. If that doesn't work, try something else.
Alas, the book isn't particularly helpful to people who aren't
already experts at solving hard problems. Still, though, it's
a classic (and classy) book. I reckon most folks on this list
will appreciate it, even if typical students might not.
You might glean some ideas for how to create exercises that
require students to build up their problem-solving skills.
===========================
A big part of the problem is that the students who show up in
the introductory class, generally speaking, have never solved
a hard problem, nor even seen it done.
Once I was helping some HS students with a robotics project,
and I typed in a snippet of code for them. One of them said
"Wow, you are amazingly good at solving hard problems."
To that I said, "You've never seen me do a hard problem. Think
about what happened there. I looked in the manual to find the
instructions, and turned the crank. It worked. Would you like
fries with that? A /hard/ problem is when there are no instructions,
or (worse) when the instructions are wrong. When every textbook
on earth says such-and-such cannot be done, and you decide to do
it anyway, that's when it gets interesting."