I agree we need to fail regularly to keep ourselves on track, if we are wise we fail in small and un-spectacular ways. That is my current hypothesis anyway, and so far the results are aligned.

As we are talking science and crypto, I have to shamelessly plug #gridcoin which instead of hash mining rewards it miners based on how much scientific research they do on the BOINC platform.
There is research into diseases, astronomy, particle physics, pure mathematics and much more, it wont slow your computer down, so come and join us and make the world better with science :)

Here are some scientific papers worked on by the BOINC community of which Gridcoin is a part.