Failure

Failure is the social concept of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and is usually viewed as the opposite of success.

Finding useful and effective criteria or heuristics to judge the success or failure of a situation may itself be a significant task.

Cultural historian Scott Sandage argues that the concept of failure underwent a metamorphosis in the United States over the course of the 19th century.

Initially, Sandage notes, financial failure, or bankruptcy, was understood as an event in a person's life: an occurrence, not a character trait.

Most of the items listed below had high expectations, significant financial investments, and/or widespread publicity, but fell far short of success.

Wan and Chan note that outcome and process failures are associated with different kinds of detrimental effects to the consumer.

Mount Holyoke assigned letter grades A through E, with E indicating lower than 75% performance and designating failure.

[10] Accordingly, Smith suggests, we ought to understand failure as involving a situation in which it is reasonable to expect a person to do something, but they do not do it—regardless of whether they intend to do it or not.

[11] Randolph Clarke, commenting on Smith's work, suggests that "[w]hat makes [a] failure to act an omission is the applicable norm".

This failure to confirm the presence of the aether would later provide support for Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.

[13] Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly explains that a great deal can be learned from things going wrong unexpectedly, and that part of science's success comes from keeping blunders "small, manageable, constant, and trackable".