Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also rem... — Douglas Adams

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Author: Douglas Adams

Insight: We're sitting on centuries of hard-won knowledge—accessible instantly, often for free—yet we keep making the same mistakes our parents made, that their parents made before them. You'd think we'd be better at this by now. The gap between what we could learn and what we actually learn is one of the stranger puzzles of being human. Part of what makes this so frustrating is that we're not stupid. We can absolutely absorb lessons from others. But learning from someone else's experience requires something harder: admitting that their situation matters to us, that their misstep could be ours, that we're not as different or as special as we'd like to believe. It's easier to think "that won't happen to me" than to actually change our behavior based on someone else's scar tissue. There's also the small matter of timing. We don't really learn from others' experience until we're ready—until we've felt the weight of a similar choice pressing down on us. Advice given too early gets filed away as background noise. The painful part is that sometimes we have to touch the hot stove ourselves, even when everyone's already told us it's hot. Maybe that's not a flaw in human nature so much as the price of actually owning what we know.

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979