What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

This essay on homelessness argues that the practical solution to the problem is incompatible with most people’s moral radar.

Gladwell cites the case of ex-Marine Murray Barr, who was without a home on the streets of Reno in the 1990s and often hospitalized for detoxification from substances. His rotation between the streets, the police department, and the emergency room was so frequent that it introduced police officer Steve Johns and the hospital social worker, Marla, who would become his future wife. Steve and Marla grew fond of Murray and he of them. This cycle, which required substance-abuse treatments and doctors’ fees, among other expenses, meant that Murray ran up a million-dollar medical bill that was likely larger than any belonging to anyone in the state.

In the early 1990s, Dennis Culhane, a Boston College graduate student, did a statistical analysis of the comings and goings of people with a home of a Philadelphia shelter. Not all residents were alike: 80% came and left quickly, moving on with their lives, but 10% were chronically without homes and lived in the shelters for years at a time. A big proportion were older or had physical or mental disabilities. This is the demographic that costs the authorities the most, especially as they never emerge from their pattern.

Philip Mangano, former director of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, posited that well-meaning schemes to help unhoused people, such as soup kitchens and shelters, were ineffective, asserting that it would be far better and cheaper for authorities to buy apartments for unhoused people. Denver was one of the cities signed up by Mangano to offer free apartments, enlisting YMCA staff to monitor the assimilation process. However, the operation found that behavioral issues led to destroyed apartments, raising the question of whether it is possible to rehabilitate individuals who are not willing to operate by society’s rules. This raises the moral conundrum of whether it is right to offer free apartments to people without homes when there are many working rent-payers struggling to keep a roof over their own heads. Still, the harsh truth is that “there isn’t enough money to go around, and to try to help everyone a little bit—to observe the principle of universality—isn’t as cost-effective as helping a few people a lot” (192), known as power-law distribution. Thus, our well-meaning principles are at odds with actually being able to fix the problem. Power-law solutions also alienate people on both sides of the political spectrum because right-wingers do not agree with handouts and left-wingers disapprove of putting efficiency over fairness.

When Murray died of intestinal bleeding, both Marla and Steve Johns were heartbroken. Gladwell considers that his death was a result of his failure to fit in to the structures of the Reno bureaucracy.

Although camera technology has become more advanced, pictures still present a problem for identifying both military targets in aerial views and breast cancer in mammography.

During the first Gulf War (1990-1991), the US Air Force aimed to locate and fell the Iraqi Scud missiles being fired at Israel, with the assistance of a $4-million camera that took a nearly perfect picture. However, because the pilots were flying at night, they could not point the camera accurately owing to their impaired depth perception. Thus, while “pictures promise to clarify,” they “often confuse” (201). Similarly, regular mammograms for women in at-risk demographics for breast cancer also have the potential to confuse while employing state-of-the-art technology. David Dershaw, head of breast imaging at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, finds that similar-looking images of calcium deposits and lumps can tell different stories about whether a patient has cancer or not, especially as radiologists can reach different conclusions about the same scan. A lump that would be plainly visible as cancer in a looser part of the breast may be entirely hidden in denser breast tissue and so remain undetected. While it might seem wise to always err on the side of caution and submit every anomaly to further screening, this would often require a great expenditure of anxiety and resources, as most ambiguities turn out to be benign. Still, research has shown that tactile examinations can be as or even more useful than visual screening, as our fingers, which have hundreds of sensors per square centimeter, are extraordinarily skilled in picking up information. However, humans have less propensity to trust the tactile sense as much as the visual.

As the quality of mammography has increased, new diagnoses of breast diseases—such as ductal carcinoma in situ, or DCIS—have soared. In a small percentage of cases, DCIS, which is only detectable through mammograms, signifies a serious cancer, but in the vast majority it is benign, and the rise in diagnosing it might contribute to the overtreatment of breast cancer.

Still, while mammograms are not fully reliable, they “do not have to be infallible to save lives” (219). They are still able to offer the kind of detection that will reduce the risk of dying from breast cancer by 10%.

British playwright Bryony Lavery’s career and reputation was ruined on account of plagiarism. Lavery, who wrote the 2004 play Frozen about a psychiatrist to serial killers, borrowed heavily from the life experiences of psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis. Lewis had published a book on her experiences called Guilty by Reason of Insanity in 1998. Lewis felt that her life had been violated without permission and was even considering a lawsuit.

Lavery had borrowed not only from this but also from Gladwell’s own profile of Lewis, titled “Damaged,” which appeared in a 1997 issue of The New Yorker. His line “the difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness […] is the difference between a sin and a symptom” appeared verbatim in Frozen (226). While Gladwell wrote Lavery a note expressing the opinion that taking his material without approval amounted to theft, he was privately delighted to have his lines on Broadway and even saw Lavery’s copying as a compliment. He wonders whether he would have fared better if Lavery had been subtler about copying him. When he read the play, he felt that his words had been employed in the service of a greater cause and that the ruination of Lavery’s reputation for plagiarism felt like an overcorrection.

American law comes down firmly on the side of intellectual property. The current law states that individuals can patent their invention for 20 years, after which others may copy and improve it in the service of public good. However, plagiarism of texts is treated by different rules, even though there are numerous examples of writers and musicians borrowing heavily from each other to create their masterpieces. Gladwell is critical of the fact that no one bothered to ask Lavery why she copied his work and whether this served the larger, universally beneficial purpose of putting “old words in the service of a new idea” (240).

When Gladwell interviewed a remorseful Lavery, she made the distinction between her use of the personal story of a woman, Marian Partington, whose sister had been murdered by serial killers and whom Lavery had contacted for permission, and Gladwell’s profile, which she categorized as “news.” Partington’s story featured details of her shattered life, and Lavery felt that it would have been unethical not to mention her. However, she did not feel that Gladwell’s more objective piece required special permission.

When Gladwell researched whether he himself had invented or plagiarized the phrase about “sins and symptoms,” he found that Indian liberation activist Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) used the combination of the two words in a quote. Gladwell feels that “plagiarism fundamentalists” ultimately deny the truth of the chain of influence that characterizes all literary output (242).

Both historically and as recently as 9/11, it has been difficult for intelligence experts to connect the dots and predict a terrorist attack. In hindsight, however, studies typically identify a pattern of clues, and people wonder why they were not spotted at the time.

This was the case with the Israeli military being surprised, in 1973, by attacks from Syrian and Egyptian forces despite evidence from the intelligence services that this would happen. However, Gladwell asserts, it became difficult to predict attacks when Middle Eastern countries were always threatening to go to war and there had been a succession of false alarms. For example, between January and October of 1973, the Egyptian army got ready for war 19 times without going through with it. It would therefore be a waste of resources for Israelis to mobilize every time a neighbor menaced them with war. Thus, Gladwell concludes that the Israeli intelligence “didn’t see the pattern of Arab intentions” because until their actual attack “their intentions didn’t form a pattern. They formed a Rorschach blot” (246).

Gladwell argues that the difficulty of interpreting intentions of countries in the Middle East in 1973 draws a parallel with the problem of determining who was to blame for the surprise attack of September 11, 2001. With the benefit of hindsight, in The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, journalist John Miller traces a pattern of events between February 1993’s first World Trade Center attack and 9/11. While the CIA knew that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two suspected Al Qaeda workers, had entered the US, they did not share the news with the FBI, and the FBI failed to act on the information that Osama bin Laden may have been sending his men to attend civilian aviation universities. The failure was seen as one of neglecting to “connect the dots,” a phrase that would be repeated so often that it became a kind of “mantra” (249). Gladwell ponders whether the notion that connecting the dots could have prevented September 11 is fair or a form of determinism, especially as civilians and journalists are not privy to classified information about all the people American intelligence detained and how many promising leads ended up leading nowhere. Gladwell draws attention to the problem of noise, whereby excess information, most of which proves to be useless, makes it difficult to uncover the truth.

An early 1970s experiment by psychology professor David L. Rosenhan, in which people without a mental illness checked into psychiatric hospitals under the invented complaint of voice-hearing, revealed the perils of determinism. Once admitted, the patients were to state that the voices had gone and they were symptom free. The patients were kept in the psychiatric unit for up to two months and administered treatment, such as pills. The hospital staff were so set upon a diagnosis that they failed to connect the evidence before their eyes that the patients were not in need of treatment.

While some changes have been made to the American intelligence system in the wake of 9/11, such as closer collaboration between the FBI and CIA via the formation of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center in 2003, Gladwell thinks this is just a change rather than an improvement, as the case can be made that these bodies were more successful when permitted to conduct their own investigations and processes. While intelligence systems today are increasingly sensitive, this introduces the risk of more false alarms, which consequently leads to reduced sensitivity in the long term. While the public desires straightforward predictions about when terrorists will strike, it is difficult to provide a clear narrative of their activities before the event, despite all the analysis that can be done in hindsight.

Gladwell traces the distinction between failure by choking, or overthinking one’s strategy so that one’s instinct is smothered, and failure by panicking, which means the type of emotional overwhelm that causes us to abandon the strategies we already know.

In making a distinction between panicking and choking, especially in sports performance, Gladwell considers whether all types of failure are equal and what the different types teach us about our personalities and thinking processes.

At the beginning of learning a new skill, we rely upon explicit learning, meaning that our thinking processes are deliberate and mechanical and our strategies are cautious. However, as we gain traction we progress to implicit learning, which feels more automatic and does not require our conscious awareness. If, under stressful conditions, the explicit system takes over from the implicit, we lose our fluidity and perform like stumbling beginners.

Panic, however, is a cessation of thinking and a falling back on our most basic survival instincts. This is because stress devours our short-term memory, making our perceptions narrow so that we can only focus on one threat, losing our peripheral vision. If choking is “about thinking too much,” panic “is about thinking too little” (269). Panicking can be cured or improved in the long term by gaining more experience in our desired skill.

Choking, however, can affect people with as much experience as their rivals under certain pressurized contexts. It particularly affects those from marginalized groups, such as women and people of color, who tend to perform equally to white males in abstract lab tests but do significantly worse when told that the same test is a measure of their intellectual ability. Studies have shown that when threatened with being presented with a stereotype about their demographic, the pressure causes marginalized groups to perform worse. While, Gladwell says, we automatically assume that failure under pressure is panic, what is actually witnessed when these marginalized groups are assessed is not the wild guessing and improvisation of panicked novices but the overthinking and second-guessing of choking veterans. Choking harms performance because it robs candidates of their capacity for intuition and quick processing. Gladwell concludes that “we have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience” (277).

Gladwell argues that while in our information-hungry age everyone is looking to blame someone for crises, often no single person or event is responsible. Instead, a combination of factors is at fault in producing an unfortunate outcome.

In April 1986, following the January 28 explosion of the Challenger shuttle, the salvage team found that chunks of charred metal and a faulty seal were crucial factors. However, Gladwell argues, postmortems will not necessarily help us avoid future disasters. Instead, high-technology accidents may have no evident causes and reflect “the complexity of the technological systems we have created” (281). While the original Challenger postmortem indicated that the accident was caused by professional incompetence, sociologist Diane Vaughan, in the first comprehensive analysis of the processes leading up to the explosion, proposed the revisionist view that NASA had followed standard procedure. A series of apparently minor decisions incrementally accumulated to cause the tragic outcome. Instead of a wild deviation from rules, it was NASA’s following of rules that worked in previous contexts that caused the accident.

Disasters that occur owing to a series of seemingly meaningless events or whole system failures have become branded as “normal accident(s)” (284). The lack of obvious explanation makes them more terrifying to human minds that hunger for certainty.

While measures to regulate accidents have been put in place in many areas of life, scholars have come up with the theory of risk homeostasis, whereby humans compensate for lower risk in one area by taking higher risks in another in ways that can be counterproductive. For example, there were more instances of child poisoning from medicine bottles after the invention of childproof caps, as parents consequently took less care in keeping these products out of their children’s reach.

Gladwell concludes that we must be realists and accept that accidents will happen despite our best efforts. The only way to prevent them is to make life itself less risky and have fewer high-tech contraptions like space shuttles.