This morning I was emptying the dishwasher, and I started, as I always do, with the dinner plates. That’s my ritual: dinner plates, smaller plates, cereal bowls, silverware (I hate that facet of the job; I'd love to subcontract out the silverware component, certainly the part where you’re putting all like items in their respective places in that damned tray), and then I finish up with glasses. When I reached the glasses today, the final step, I realized I’d missed a dinner plate. It was standing right there in the front of the bin and I hadn't noticed it.
If some gadfly-philosopher intent on making a grand cosmic point (or a big score) had snuck into my kitchen and secured the dishwasher right before I made my discovery, then bet me $100,000 about the possible existence of a renegade plate, I would’ve taken the bet. And if that individual then smiled, told me I was wrong and put his/her hand out for the payday, I’d insist he/she was lying. I simply would not believe it.
There were no more dinner plates in that freakin’ dishwasher! There couldn’t be.
Yet there it was, in all its dinner-platey glory.
In truth, this is a not-uncommon foible in the close personal relationship between me and my Maytag: I’ll think I’ve put away one entire category of items, then later, usually only towards the very end, do I realize that I missed one. How does this happen? Especially when you're making a conscious effort to locate and organize items by category and you’re working in a confined space like a dishwasher bin—how do you miss things that would seem...unmissable? It’s not exactly like an Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn, yanno.
There are, of course, more mystical interpretations having to do with trees falling in forests. How do I really know the dinner plate was there before I saw it? Maybe it had just...appeared? We'll leave such alternate explanations in abeyance for now, or maybe entrust them to the Deepak Chopras of the world.
More importantly, you wonder—or at least you should—in how many other arenas of does this same phenomenon apply? (Anwer: all of them.) You think you’ve got a situation pegged—you’d swear you’ve taken into account every variable, weighed all facts there are to weigh—but in truth you’ve overlooked something, perhaps even the macro version of the dinner plate in my dishwasher. (Remember those tedious analogies from the SATs? “A dinner plate is to service for eight like _____ is to life.”)
And here’s the thing: In the case of a dishwasher, the error will be discovered in time, likely quite soon. The appliance isn’t going anywhere. You’d assume that at worst, when it gets to the point where the plate is the very last thing in the machine, I’ll notice it. Even if I don’t, maybe my wife will open the dishwasher to put in some dishes from breakfast and say, “There’s a plate in here. Is it clean or dirty?” Even if she doesn’t notice, the plate gets washed again with the next load of dirties. So what?
But what of situations that are transient, evolutionary, mercurial? Situations that come and go in the blink of an (unseeing) eye? Situations where that unnoticed “dinner plate” may set in motion a cascading series of events that reach a most unfortunate critical mass?
I ran this vignette by an erstwhile editor of mine at the Wall Street Journal. He was underwhelmed. “A cute little story,” he said, “but far less than meets the eye. OK, so we can’t possibly know everything in every given moment. So? We do the best we can based on the information we’ve got. You can’t get all caught up in what you don’t know, or else nothing would ever get done.”
That sort of shrugging “BFD/so what?” outlook overlooks the crucial implications here for human fallibility and, in turn, the humility we ought to feel about the things we’re sure we know. Of course we still need to get things done. We must make decisions based on the information at hand. It’s just that maybe we might consider making those decisions with somewhat less arrogance about our course of action than many (most?) of us display as we go about our business.
This is not intended as a segue to a piece that’s “really about” the criminal-justice system, but let’s take the matter of eyewitness identifications. I researched the topic extensively some years back for an article for Skeptic. Eyewitness IDs were once considered the gold standard of courtroom evidence, and continue to make for moments of high drama as a distraught witness points and blares:
“That's the man who raped me and I'll go to my grave seeing his ugly, sweaty face!”
In recent years, however, eyewitness IDs have been revealed for the sham that most folks in law enforcement (privately) knew them to be all along. (Such folks are disinclined to admit this publicly because they’re in the business of “clearing” as many cases as possible.)
The Innocence Project reports that in nearly 70 percent of the 375 cases it has helped overturn via DNA evidence, original convictions were won based in whole or in part on eyewitness (mis)identification. The prisoners in question served an average of a dozen years behind bars before exoneration. Seventeen were on Death Row.
Someday, I hope, we’ll get a handle on how many innocent people were actually executed (or, to put it more colorfully, how many went to their death seeing their false accuser's ugly, sweaty face). Perhaps such grim revelations will help drive home the point with regard to just how certain we should be about the things we’re certain of.
Needless to say, there are countless other key areas of life where this same phenomenon applies: love, child-raising, workplace dynamics. (Do I even need to mention here the various positions taken during the various phases of COVID that turned out to be misguided at best? And we won’t know the whole truth for years, if ever.)
How do we ever know what we simply don’t know? How can we be sure we’ve based our conclusions on all of the evidence? How can we even assess the validity of the things we take as Givens—those basics where we reassure ourselves, “Well, if nothing else, at least we know [fill in the blank].”
Every day in America, motorists pull away from stop signs certain that the coast is clear…when it isn’t. In Texas alone in 2019, 119 people died in 28,955 accidents wherein drivers failed to yield the right of way at a stop sign. We’re not talking about blithely barreling through the sign (a separate category resulting in over 13,000 accidents and 90 deaths in that same Texas study); we’re talking about misjudging the window of opportunity to proceed or making other unforced errors. Surely in some cases we’re talking about not seeing things that were there to see.
I doubt that too many of those Texans said to the kids in the backseat, “Hell, maybe I can beat that cement mixer, maybe I can’t, but here goes nothing!”
No, Mr. Wall Street Journal editor, this is not an argument for stasis, for analysis-paralysis. It’s an argument for doing what we do with a heavy dose of skepticism and self-doubt.
This is a common bugaboo in all forms of planning: You think you’ve got it covered. You think you’ve thought of everything. Till you realize that not only didn’t you think of everything, but the thing you didn’t think about (1) was, or should have been, obvious and (2) negated or undid everything else you were trying to accomplish.
To repurpose a quick story from my 2005 book, SHAM: In an odd and unprecedented coincidence, over the course of a couple of years, two or three Little Leaguers died tragically when pitched baseballs struck them in the chest and stopped their hearts. Distraught parents sued the leagues, claiming—most of us would agree—that nothing outweighs the safety of a child. But some smaller leagues, especially in underfunded inner-city neighborhoods, could not afford the liability insurance or extra protective gear that soon became mandatory, so they shut down. Now the affected kids were no longer exposed to the (generally remote) danger of having their hearts stopped by a pitch...but they also had nothing to do after school or on weekends, so they gravitated to more mischievous, if not downright dangerous, activities. As a result, many more than just two or three kids died, and countless other kids veered off in the wrong direction in life.
That’s textbook Law of Unintended Consequences. A measure meant to “protect the children!” ends up harming many more of them.
What’s more, it’s bad enough that so many of us are certain of facts that prove not to be, but what of those who bull their way through life with moral indignance? If we can be wrong in matters where factual answers exist, how presumptuous is it to be certain of moral issues that resolve to sheer opinion?
So try to keep in mind that sometimes a dish in a dishwasher isn’t just a dish in a dishwasher, to play off the reasoning of our old friend Freud. Sometimes it’s a luckless guy on Death Row. Sometimes it’s the WMDs that are—or aren’t?—hidden in bunkers in a far-off land run by a despot we hate. Sometimes it’s a woman passing a school bus.
Sometimes it’s the best way to handle a bug that came out of nowhere to play havoc with our perceptions of normalcy.