How can we avoid traps?

Mistakes are made in research, science, analysis, data collection, assumptions, etc for any number of reasons. Many people have asked how we can prevent such mistakes from happening. Today, at the end of class, I asked you a different question. What if we accept that mistakes will be made and might even be unavoidable? Are there ways that we, as a society or research community, can avoid getting trapped into following wrong directions by those inevitable mistakes?