Losing Big - A Winning Strategy?

This is suggested by the Title Story , Wired Magazine Jan-10 (indeed, an interesting view; I especially like the The-Fall&Rise-of-Alec-Baldwin part ;) ).

I doubt that the financial crisis is result of such a strategy, but let us hope that the conclusions are. Its greatest mistakes, IMO, public intervention, leverage because of highly correlated deals, too less cost of money, toxic instruments - giving the false comfort of bullet-proof vests, but also the race of model complexity (I wrote about this in When Good ENUF is Great ).

However, is it necessary to train our brain to embrace failure, to open ourselves to new discoveries (Wired) by suffering from real downturns? As neuroscientists suggest. If we don't "feel" the failure, we ignore it as anomaly of the experiment? Maybe true.

But often real live downturn experiences took too short or too long, or destroy everything, ...

What about provoking mistakes in scenarios, make stress tests on pathologic cases and demonstrate bad behavior in simulations?