A little serendipity leads me to offer a couple of suggestions this morning.
“Mistakes were made” is a classic D.C. euphemism for excusing everything from sexual peccadilloes to untold “colateral” deaths. At least it did until doubling down replaced a mea culpa among a large fraction of the political class.
Adam Davidson, contributing writer to The New Yorker, points to a tweet thread by Oliver Kim, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Kim recounts just one of the many errors that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.
In his clinical analysis of the land reform question, Edward Mitchell fell victim to one of the classic blunders, Kim explains: reverse causality. In his rebuttal, Robert L. Sansom likened Mitchell’s error to “observing that all who had the flu had been visited by doctors, [& concluding] that the doctors caused the flu.”
The most famous classic blunder is never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Coincidentally, Wired‘s Kevin Kelly included that one in a list of maxims he offered last year on his birthday. Digby passed it along (via James Fallows) last weekend. It’s worth reading.
To that list, I’ll add a couple, beginning with one that bit Mitchell:
● Know what you don’t know. The most famous example is suggesting injecting disinfectant to cure COVID-19. “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
● I’m not as smart as I think I am. A corollary to the one above. There are libraries filled with things I don’t know.
● First identify the right problem. Clients often asked me to solve the wrong problem. My job was not to fix the problem they’d identified but to solve the problem that really needed fixing. The fix was often simpler than what they imagined.
If I think of any others, I may add them here later.