Reading Brooks' Bests and Reexamining What We Know

How do people know what happened?  Even things they've seen themselves.  How does what other people say affect what they 'know?'   We really don't know that much about these things.  Kevin L. Leahy, an attorney who has defended corporations against asbestos personal injury claims writes about the memory of witnesses:

Cognition specialists discuss memory as a process that has three primary stages: (1) encoding; (2) consolidation and storage; and (3) retrieval. (Id.) Each step involves biological efforts within our brains to ensure that an eyewitness account is accurately retained. (May 2003 issue of HarrisMartin’s COLUMNS-Asbestos.)

He goes on to say that unlike artists or story tellers, who can fill in the details after the fact, and not necessarily accurately,

eyewitnesses have no license to stray from their understanding of past events during trial. Our system expressly demands that witnesses “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Once the bailiff and judge forbid conscious manipulation of testimony, however, the remaining instructions are generally silent about the accuracy of the witness’ recall.

So, you might ask, where is this coming from and where is it going?  David Brooks, in the Friday, Dec. 25, 2009 NY Times gives out his Sidney Awards to the best magazine essays  of 2009.

One of his choices is a lengthy story about Todd Willingham, an unemployed auto mechanic, who was put to death in Texas for killing his three daughters by burning his house down.  All the expert witness arson evidence pointed to Willingham.  And so did the eyewitness evidence.  But a friend who came to know Willingham when he was on death row, decided to  recheck the evidence.  And what she found suggested that  some of the details the eyewitnesses gave, was revised later on, after they were exposed to what the 'experts' thought.  From the New Yorker artcle,  "Trial by Fire"   by David Grann:

The witnesses’ testimony also grew more damning after authorities had concluded, in the beginning of January, 1992, that Willingham was likely guilty of murder. In Diane Barbee’s initial statement to authorities, she had portrayed Willingham as “hysterical,” and described the front of the house exploding. But on January 4th, after arson investigators began suspecting Willingham of murder, Barbee suggested that he could have gone back inside to rescue his children, for at the outset she had seen only “smoke coming from out of the front of the house”—smoke that was not “real thick.”

An even starker shift occurred with Father Monaghan’s testimony. In his first statement, he had depicted Willingham as a devastated father who had to be repeatedly restrained from risking his life. Yet, as investigators were preparing to arrest Willingham, he concluded that Willingham had been too emotional (“He seemed to have the type of distress that a woman who had given birth would have upon seeing her children die”); and he expressed a “gut feeling” that Willingham had “something to do with the setting of the fire.”

Dozens of studies have shown that witnesses’ memories of events often change when they are supplied with new contextual information. Itiel Dror, a cognitive psychologist who has done extensive research on eyewitness and expert testimony in criminal investigations, told me, “The mind is not a passive machine. Once you believe in something—once you expect something—it changes the way you perceive information and the way your memory recalls it.”

Certainly anyone who is married knows that spouses can remember something that just happened very differently, and both are sure they are right.  And as Democrats and Republicans and everyone in-between or beyond makes claims about health and other policies, I  wonder what causes people to be so sure about things they can't possibly know too much about.  If eyewitnesses have trouble remembering what they saw in the past, how can we possibly know for certain things that haven't yet happened (the effects of carbon on the environment, the impact of health reform, etc.)  I'm not saying we can't make educated guesses based on the facts we do know.  I'm really referring to the people who are absolutely certain, who have no doubts, who can't see any possibility that perhaps their opponents may actually be right.

[Update, Saturday afternoon:  The New Yorker Fire article is 17 pages long and I'd only read part of it when I first posted.  The real issue in this article about knowing is that the arson experts based their findings on myth.  They didn't know:

In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”[emphases added]]

And, as I remind readers now and then, this blog is fundamentally about examining what I know.  

Anyway, Brooks' recommendations are worth a look.  Besides Grann's reexam of the arson evidence,  Brooks has several more suggestions.  He mentioned, but because it was published in the New York Times (where he himself writes) did not include it,  David Rohde's  series on being a Taliban captive that I pointed out in October.

His other choices include:

1. Atul Gawande’s piece, “The Cost Conundrum,” in The New Yorker, was the most influential essay of 2009, and
   
   
2. David Goldhill’s “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in The Atlantic, explained why the U.S. needs fundamental health reform.
   
   
3. Jonathan Rauch’s delightful essay, “Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight,” in The National Journal. Rauch described what the airline industry would look like if it worked the way the health care industry works.
   
   
4. Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard['s] . . . piece, “A Rake’s Progress” was a sympathetic and gripping profile of Marion Barry, the former Washington, D.C., mayor, crack-smoker and recent girlfriend-stalker.
   
   
5. S. Frederick Starr’s “Rediscovering Central Asia,” in The Wilson Quarterly, is an eye-opening look at what once was. A thousand years ago, those mountains [around Afghanistan] were the intellectual center of the world. Central Asians invented trigonometry, used crystallization as a means of purification, estimated the Earth’s diameter with astonishing precision and anticipated Darwin’s theory of evolution.

(While I've added numbers, I've kept Brooks' own descriptions above)  All the articles challenge our notions of what we know, if you are looking with that in mind.

Atul Gawande does a case study to see if looking at the most expensive town in the US can give him new insights.

The question we’re now frantically grappling with is how this came to be, and what can be done about it. McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers.

 Goldhill's article on his dad's hospital caused death immediately made me rethink the level of risk of different activities just by how he placed statistics side-by-side:

My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals. One hundred thousand deaths: more than double the number of people killed in car crashes, five times the number killed in homicides, 20 times the total number of our armed forces killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Another victim in a building American tragedy.

Jonathan Rauch’s article, gives us another way to 'know' the health care system.  He imagines booking an airline ticket as though the airlines were run like health care.  It causes us to 'know' the issues differently than before.

May I have your flight-insurance information, please?"
"Millennium Travel Care, group number 068832, ID number RS-3390041B."
"I'm sorry, sir, we're not in Millennium Travel Care's provider network."
"You're listed on their website. It says you accept Millennium."
"We did until last week. If you like, you can pay out of pocket for your ticket."
"How much would that be?"
"Yes, sir, I'll be happy to get that price for you. That would be $17,885.70."
"What? For a flight to Chicago? Does anyone actually pay that?"
"I'm sorry, sir, I wouldn't know. I can tell you that different clients and insurers pay different rates. For individuals, the rate is $17,885.70."
"Oh."

[Update Jan. 8, 2009:  Phil Munger put up this video of a version of the Rausch airline/health piece on Progressive Alaska.]


I'm having some trouble seeing a different way of knowing in the Matt Labash article.  It's a rip roaring article that reminds me of Tom Wolfe.  Brooks calls it sympathetic, I'd say it's more like damning with very occasional faint praise.

Barry is by now transported himself. He gets up and joins the mosh pit of ululators, swinging his arms like a child readying himself for the standing broad-jump at a school track meet. When asked afterward what part of the sermon spoke to him most, he says, "All of it," then starts throwing some Bible himself. "It says, 'Greater is He that is in us than he that is in the world,' " Barry says, adding his own interpretation: "Greater than devils, and evil-doers, and haters .  .  . Barry critics."
It's a tad ironic that while all but Emperor-for-Life in Ward 8, Barry didn't make his bones as mayor by standing up for "the last, the least, and the lost," as he has spent the post-Vista half of his career rebranding himself in these parts. While his signature summer-jobs program for youth insured that you can swing a cat in a local black neighborhood and hit five adults for whom Barry provided their first gig, his primary accomplishment was riding '80s-era real-estate-boom market forces.
Barry threw the city open to development the likes of which D.C. hadn't seen before. He was so proactive that old staffers tell how, early in his mayoral tenure, he used to have weekly brainstorming brown-bag lunches with architects and developers and would fast-track formerly glacial construction-approval processes with Post-it notes saying "Good idea, do it!" When he assumed office in 1979, whole quadrants of the city were ghost towns, and there were streets untouched since they were torched in the '68 riots.

It's not so much about knowing something differently as adding more data to what we know. Though at one point we do see Barry having an insight about his behavior:

Both Barry and Linda talk freely about how much he cared for Effi, which prompts me to ask how he could put her through what he did: the infidelity, the public humiliation. Linda covers for him: "He's not doing it out of disrespect, or less love for the person he's committed to at that time."
Barry takes this in, meditatively chewing on a pineapple slice. "I haven't thought about it much," he confesses. "First of all, I love people. Attractive women. They're all attractive to me if they're female." We laugh.
"No, really," he insists:

But I guess part of what happens in life is you are what you see. Growing up without a natural father, I didn't see these one-on-one relationships. I'm just thinking about it for the first time, quite frankly. I mean I've thought about it, but not in this depth. .  .  . I think there ought to be fidelity between a man and a woman. .  .  . But you are what you see. And when I was growing up, I didn't see men who were one-woman men. So I guess it sort of got caught in my personality. I'm not rationalizing it. It is what it is. [Emphasis added]

S. Frederick Star's "Rediscovering Central Asia" gives us a number of ways to rearrange what we 'know.'  Most obvious is filling in the gaping holes in our knowledge about that part of the world where our military is most visibly engaged.  Many of us think about it as a backward land of ignorant people.  That isn't true today, and Star tells us that it certainly wasn't true in the past.

It is one thing to draw a circle on the map, but quite another to explain why this region, call it Greater Central Asia, should have produced such a cultural flowering. Booming cities provided the setting for cultural life. A traveling Arab marveled at what he called the “land of a thousand cities” in what is now Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The ruins of mighty Balkh, once the capital of this region, still spread for miles and miles across the plain west of modern Mazar–­i-­Sharif in Afghanistan. In its heyday Balkh was larger than Paris, Rome, Beijing, or Delhi. Like all the great regional centers, it had running water, baths, and majestic palaces—and solidly built homes of sun-dried brick for non-palace dwellers.

It was also richer, thanks to continental trade. Merchants from Balkh and other Central Asian commercial centers journeyed to the Middle East, Europe, China, and deep into India. Traders from those lands brought goods to the sprawling commercial entrepôts in Greater Central Asia. Since slavery thrived throughout the Muslim world and beyond, the bazaars also included large slave markets. Gold, silver, and bronze currency from these thriving hubs of commerce traveled all the way to Gotland in Sweden and to Korea and Sri ­Lanka.

And for most US citizens who think of their country as the world's cultural leader today, it's sobering to remember the fate of such leaders of the past.   There's an opportunity for a little rearranging of our mental maps in this article, if one is open to that sort of activity.

Leahy - you remember him, the asbestos lawyer mentioned at the beginning of this post - used three cognitive steps to frame his discussion of eyewitnesses' ability to accurately report what they had seen in the past.  We shouldn't just be adding facts to reinforce our old stored beliefs.  We should be rearranging everything know and then to see whether that affords us a more effective view of the world. 


David Brooks recommends people forgo watching "It's a Wonderful Life" once again and read these articles instead.  (He has still more recommendations coming Tuesday.)  And given that in today's world, you don't have to go to the library or bookstore to read these, I'd nudge you to give at least a couple a look.  And remind yourself how much you can actually expand what you know with a couple of hours of reading good stuff.