This is an I-Heart podcast.

Hello, this is Tim Harford here, host of cautionary tales,

the show that tells you stories of catastrophes

from the past and explores what we can learn from them. Today, our podcast is taking over the Pushkin

Network for a very special episode. I've invited some of the great and good from Pushkin to join me

to give their take on the nature of mistakes

and how we should think about them.

Coming up, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova hosts of risky business on regretting mistakes

and the mistake of regrets.

You see that people aren't afraid of regretting, selling a stock and then having it go up.

They fear that more than they regret, you know, holding onto it and having it go down.

And then Jonathan Goldstein from Heavyweight muses with author Sheila Hetty

about how we should feel about mistakes, based on her experiences with accidental

ketamine, missing money, and a flying baby.

I was on the ground and somebody threw me this child, and I remember thinking in that

moment, you cannot drop this baby.

But first, I want to kick things off with a classic cautionary tale, a strange happening in a canal. It's 1978.

A dredging gang working working for British waterways,

are struggling with a stubborn problem on the picturesque Chesterfield Canal.

They're trying to strengthen a section of the canal's sidewall,

which means dredging away silt and removing submerged junk.

That's not easy at the best of times.

...