Things Are Seldom As They Seem

We often fix the obvious when we really should be looking deeper.

Not everything is as it seems. If you hear the murder rate has gone down is it safe to assume there’s less violent crime?

A few years ago the wife of a friend, she an ER doc, pointed out it’s not fewer assaults but better treatment that gets this result!

We’ve got so much traumatic injury experience (because of an increase in violent crime, but also battle experience from Vietnam forward) that death can be held off. That was sobering to hear then and still resonates.

With that in mind let me recommend a short article from Mother Jones (MoJo to the cognoscenti)–The Counterintuitive World. Part of the article relates to RAF experience with airplanes during World War II.

if a plane makes it back safely even though it has, say, a bunch of bullet holes in its wings, it means that bullet holes in the wings aren’t very dangerous. What you really want to do is armor up the areas that, on average, don’t have any bullet holes. Why? Because planes with bullet holes in those places never made it back.

I suspect there’s an easy TSA/airport lesson to be learned here. I’ll let you figure that out on your own.

We often fix the obvious when we really should be looking deeper.

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