The stove is hot, don't touch it

Other such gems like the above one spring to mind, like "Don't touch the big red conspicuous red button" . I wonder how many of you out there prefer to add to your persona profile by experiencing rather than by listening to what others tell you. Even as adults would like to press the big red button out of curiousity rather than be told not to. As a child, you were pretty much an opposite machine, unceasingly taking every opportunity to do the opposite of what you were told. Either out of mild curiosity from what might happen to you, or a masochistic interest on what the reaction might be from your parents. At least that was what my strange childhood was like.

Where's he going with this, you might ask?

Well, I wonder how many of you out there still continue to learn by your mistakes, prefering getting the data and experience from the experience itself rather than being told that it's a bad idea. The most likely response from you guys would be that... you guessed it.....it depends. Do you choose not to try a toke because of adverse effect from that one-off occasion (or possibly it might become addictive)? Perhaps you'll see the world with that much more clarity and how everyone else who's not wasted could have got things so horribly wrong ;) If the answer to this question is yes, where do you draw the line of deciding to take a gamble and just do it? Do there have to be large amounts of quantifiable data to make a decision, or is there just a gut-feeling formula. It'd be really handy that if the gut feeling was a personal, universal truth and that the combination of bile and adrenalin released in to the body that could be accurately measured and thus "what you should do" would be measurable.