Science Quote by Jim Horning

Horning’s aphorism has the clean snap of lab wisdom: it treats failure not as a moral lapse but as a necessary input. As a scientist, he’s speaking from a culture where being wrong isn’t just common, it’s instrumentally useful. The line’s brilliance is its circular economy. “Good judgement” is framed as a product, not a trait; “experience” is the factory; “bad judgement” is the raw material. You don’t get to skip the messy part.

The subtext is a rebuke to credential-worship and hindsight smugness. In most professional settings, people perform competence by hiding errors, laundering uncertainty into confident narratives. Horning flips that incentive structure. He implies that the people you should distrust are the ones with immaculate records, because spotless judgment can signal sheltered work, low-stakes decisions, or an environment that punishes experimentation into extinction.

Context matters here: in science and engineering, progress is often a trail of controlled disappointments. You hypothesize, test, watch reality refuse your story, then adjust. Bad judgment is baked into the process because the frontier is defined by what you don’t yet know. The quote also carries a quiet ethical prompt: build systems where mistakes are survivable and legible. If experience must come from bad judgment, then the mature move isn’t pretending we can eliminate error. It’s designing feedback loops, guardrails, and cultures that convert errors into learning before they convert into catastrophe.

It’s a compact argument for humility with teeth: wisdom isn’t purity; it’s scars with data attached.