We need to be more honest and admit our own mistakes, believes one of today's leading astrophysicists, Sol Perlmacher.
The Nobel Prize winner in physics changed the way we look at the world after his discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
But he says it wouldn't have happened if it weren't for mistakes in his previous work, and that's why he tells people not to be afraid of failure.
As a young postdoctoral researcher, Perlmacher, along with a team of senior scientists, believed they were very close to making a significant discovery.
They discovered a signal that seemed to match what a planet would emit and were convinced they had found the first credible scientific evidence of a planet outside our solar system.
It would have been a huge revelation, but unfortunately it wasn't meant to be.
It turned out that the signal was coming from a device next to their hypersensitive telescope.
"Fortunately, I was young in a group of very experienced and respected scientists," Perlmacher recalls of this oversight.
"I think we explained what was going on quickly enough that people wouldn't resent us too much," he writes in the new book Third Millennium Thinking: Making Sense in a World of Nonsense, which he co-authored with philosopher John Campbell and psychologist Robert McCown.
While it may seem counterintuitive to admit a mistake made decades ago, Perlmacher wants to challenge the negative connotations of failure, stressing that it has, in the long run, improved his work.
"People are really embarrassed to say they've done something wrong," Perlmacher told the BBC.
"I hope we can all remember such moments. I think it would be really interesting," he says, admitting that he was "a lot more careful" after the mistakes he made.
Later in the course of his research, Perlmater expected to find the rate at which the expansion of the universe is slowing down, but after careful and extensive research in 1998, he discovered just the opposite.
The result indicated that a mysterious force, since called dark energy, was driving the acceleration.
For this discovery, Perlmacher and astronomers Brian Schmidt and Adam Ries shared the Nobel Prize in 2011.
"I think most of what a scientist does is actually looking for their own mistakes," Perlmacher told Nobel Prize Outreach, an organization that spreads knowledge about Nobel Prize-winning achievements.
"We were going out to make measurements, and obtaining quantitative data is difficult.
"You spend a lot of time trying to figure out, 'Is what I did today right?'" he added.
But it's not just about admitting one's mistakes, Perlmatter says.
Its mission is much larger - to provide people with scientific, critical thinking.
He explains how he began to wonder why practical and simple decisions were debated as emotional or partisan issues rather than rationally.
"It didn't seem to make sense," says Perlmater.
"I've noticed that if you look at scientists' lunch conversations, they use a completely different set of thinking tools than other people."
Perlmater says he wants to correct that, and it's addressed in his book and in a course he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States (USA) and which he created in collaboration with the organization Nobel Prize Outreach.
Perlmacher wants to empower the average person and give them the tools that scientists use to solve problems.
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Solving problems the way scientists do
One of the topics Perlmater deals with is how to recognize which experts to trust.
In a world that is flooded with information, how do we choose who we should listen to?
Perlmatter says that no one is infallible and always right, but that we can get closer to what he describes as a 100 percent calibrated model.
In the scientific world, calibration means defining a confidence interval.
For example, if a doctor says you have a brain tumor, instead of taking it at face value, you should approach the situation like scientists do and ask doctors to describe how confident they are in the diagnosis, even asking for a percentage of the probability of such a diagnosis, Perlmacher explains.
This may sound simple, but if the doctor says that he is 99 percent sure of the diagnosis, that is a big difference compared to not five percent and what needs to be done next.
Perlmutter says that people are often overconfident, so an expert who is realistic about his knowledge seems like someone to be trusted.
It is perhaps easy to see how helpful the thinking of scientists can be in the example of a doctor's diagnosis or a mortgage broker suggesting the best product given current market conditions.
But Perlmater points out that this kind of conversation can be helpful in politics, too.
He argues that public policies, to begin with, should be presented with the caveat that they will not be completely correct.
"If you come up with a plan for the health system, it will probably face some problems during implementation.
"You have to build the ability to observe, to try, to see what's wrong and what's going right, and then try a new version.
"We would prefer to live in a world where all political arguments are formulated in this way because it shows that there is room for learning and adaptation.
"But obviously it's not something that makes the average person say, 'Yeah, that's the candidate I'm voting for.' At least, not yet," say Perlmater and the co-authors of the mentioned book.
Perlmater believes that if we as a society approached different situations in a more scientific way, we would be much more accepting of other people's mistakes.
He believes that nothing is actually a mistake, but that it is an opportunity to learn or as he says: "It's not a failure, it's a process".
This content was created in collaboration with Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.
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