Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Episode: The Canal, the Crash and the Ketamine – Pushkin’s Reign of Error
Date: October 17, 2025
Host: Tim Harford
Guests: Nate Silver & Maria Konnikova (Risky Business), Jonathan Goldstein (Heavyweight), Sheila Hetty (author)

Overview

This special crossover episode of Cautionary Tales sees Tim Harford inviting fellow Pushkin hosts and thinkers to collectively explore the nature of mistakes—why we make them, why they haunt us, and what (if anything) we can learn from them. The episode oscillates between true historical disasters and personal slip-ups, blending them into an absorbing and often funny meditation on human fallibility.

Segment 1: The Case of the Disappearing Canal

[03:21–06:01]

Story:

• In 1978, a crew working on England’s Chesterfield Canal tried to remove a buried iron chain, unknowingly pulling out a “plug” installed two centuries earlier and draining an entire section of the historic canal.
• The plug’s existence had been lost to organizational memory, having disappeared from records in a fire.

Key Insight:

• "If something’s really, really hard to move, it might be wiser to leave it in place." (Tim Harford, [06:16])
• Catastrophes often arise from forgotten history, poor documentation, and overconfidence in one’s current understanding—a setup for avoidable error.

Segment 2: Regret, Decision-Making, and Human Error with Nate Silver & Maria Konnikova

[07:24–17:54]

Exploring Regret

• Maria frames regret as a force that powerfully shapes decision-making—possibly more than anticipated consequences.
• Poker is a recurring metaphor (“hands we did not play, the bluffs we did not run”) reflecting the agony of inaction versus the less-fraught experience of failed action.
  • “It's always those ones that we regret and that we think about over and over and over, isn't it?” (Maria Konnikova, [08:23])

The Psychology of Mistakes and Missed Opportunities

• The fear of regretting a missed opportunity is often greater than regretting a misstep.
  • “Trying to avoid regret is something that can drive our decision making to an irrational degree…” (Maria, [08:29])
• The endowment effect and FOMO (fear of missing out) compound this, causing irrational risk aversion or risk taking.
  • “When you already have something, it suddenly has much greater value than it did before you had it.” (Maria, [11:51])

Hindsight Bias and Outcome-Oriented Thinking

• Nate and Maria underscore the danger of being “results-oriented” rather than focusing on sound decision-making processes.
  • “When you're making good decisions, you can't be outcome oriented, right? You have to separate yourself from the outcome of the decision. You have to just think through the process.” (Maria, [13:44])
• One exception: If subsequent information reveals your “thesis” was wrong, that’s a time to adapt.
  • "The times when regret is most appropriate...are when you knew a decision was bad and you did it anyway." (Nate, [16:25])

Memorable Quotes

• Maria: “The choice not to act, the choice to kind of maintain status quo, is also a choice that can also lead to a lot of regret.” ([17:20])
• Nate: “…sometimes when you book a win, you forget about it. You can learn a lot from wins too.” ([16:25])

Segment 3: The Mistake of Regret – Jonathan Goldstein & Sheila Hetty

[21:33–31:37]

What is a Mistake?

• Sheila defines a mistake as “something that you did with little thought that if you had put more thought into it, you would have made a different decision.” ([21:59])
• Regret and mistakes are different: “You can regret things that were even by all accounts the best thing you could have done in that situation.” ([22:23])

The $50,000 Grant

• Sheila recounts applying for a grant, giving her old email, and nearly losing $50,000 due to missing the notification.
  • “I thought I just lost $50,000 because I did this stupid thing of not forwarding my emails to my new address…” ([23:16])
  • “I can’t even tell my partner. I can’t tell anyone about this. Like, this is just too careless.” ([25:24])
• Relief comes when she barely recovers the funds—a near-miss spurring shame and self-reflection.

The Ketamine Therapy Mishap

• While researching for an article, Sheila ignores clinic instructions, swallows the ketamine instead of swishing and spitting.
  • On realizing her error after reviewing the tape: “And I completely didn't hear it. And they couldn't get me stressed out about it, because otherwise I'd have this horrible trip. So they're like, oh, it's okay, it's okay…" ([26:29])
• It’s a recurring error pattern: “This is the kind of mistake that I make all the time. Just like not listening to instructions, not paying attention, thinking, I know everything. I don’t need to listen to the instructions.” ([26:49])

The Flying Baby

• Sheila describes the intense clarity that came when someone threw her a baby at a party:
  • “I remember thinking in that moment, you cannot drop this baby. And I didn’t…in most situations, there is this margin of, who cares if I drop the cereal or not? … But I was like, this is not one of those times. You have to put every cell into catching that baby properly.” ([28:03]-[29:08])
• Conclusion: “You realize that mistakes are a luxury sometimes. If you feel like there is no margin for error…then you don’t.” (Jonathan, [30:01])

On Optimism and Making Peace

• Sheila: “I probably don’t try that hard [to avoid mistakes] because I figure things will work out in the end. I have a basic optimistic feeling about my life.” ([30:52])
• On how to move on: “Just make a new one.” – Sheila’s philosophy towards mistakes ([31:37])

Segment 4: The Gimli Glider – “A Most Canadian Catastrophe”

[34:33–49:44]

Story:

• Air Canada Flight 143 nearly crashes after being accidentally under-fueled due to a botched conversion between imperial and metric units.
  • The airline had incomplete procedures and gaps in training due to an ongoing metrics switch.
• The pilots, untrained in manual fuel calculation, rely on outdated, unclear processes, leading to catastrophic under-fueling.

Key Moments:

• “The upshot of all this confusion was that the plane was actually fuelled up not with 22,600 kilograms of fuel, but with 22,600 pounds, less than half of what was intended.” ([35:27])
• Running out of fuel at 41,000 feet, the Boeing 767 becomes a giant glider; Captain Bob Pearson, an experienced glider pilot, manages an astonishing emergency landing in Gimli, a decommissioned airstrip being used for a motorsports event.
• The landing happens amid children on bicycles and festival-goers; the plane’s undercarriage collapses, which miraculously absorbs momentum and prevents further disaster.

Lessons:

• “Organisational memory matters. Just as British Waterways had long ago forgotten that the Chesterfield Canal had plugs, Air Canada had forgotten that sometimes you need to calculate a fuel load manually.” (Tim Harford, [44:24])
• “Doing a complex piece of arithmetic suddenly became a matter of life and death, and the crew had forgotten how to do it. Thank goodness that Captain Pearson hadn’t forgotten how to glide.” ([44:24])
• Other pilots have failed the scenario in simulations: this was a heroic near-miss, not a repeatable accident.

Insights & Memorable Quotes

On Regret and Decision-making

• “It's that inaction rather than the action that actually motivates me and that stays with me as a bigger mistake.” – Maria Konnikova ([08:28])
• “We should also remember that, you know, you can regret doing something, but you can also regret not doing something.” – Maria ([17:20])

On Organization and Memory

• “Organisational memory matters ... If something’s really, really hard to move, it might be wiser to leave it in place.” – Tim Harford ([06:16]; [44:24])

On Moving On from Mistakes

• “How do you or do you make peace with a mistake? Just make a new one.” – Sheila Hetty ([31:37])

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Segment | |----------|--------------------------------------------------| | 03:21 | Chesterfield Canal disappearance | | 07:24 | Nate Silver & Maria Konnikova on regret | | 21:33 | Jonathan Goldstein & Sheila Hetty on mistakes | | 23:16 | Sheila’s $50K grant story | | 26:29 | The ketamine therapy mix-up | | 28:03 | The “flying baby” story; mistakes as a luxury | | 34:33 | Story of the Gimli Glider (Air Canada 143) | | 44:24 | Conclusion and lessons about organizational error |

Final Takeaways

This “Reign of Error” is an ode to the inevitability of mistakes—big and small, disastrous and hilarious. The episode weaves history and personal anecdote into a tapestry of reminders:

• Regret, if unchecked, can become an irrational driver.
• Process matters more than outcome.
• Organization-wide memory (or its absence) sets traps for future catastrophe.
• Some errors are recoverable, some are not, and a few—like a crashed plane or a missed grant—depend as much on luck as on belated diligence.
• Sometimes, the only thing left to do is make peace and “just make a new one.”

Listeners walk away wiser and perhaps just a little more forgiving of their own, and others’, inevitable errors.