Beyond Blame

Chapter 4. The Bad Apples

Bill finished the last of his beer, and carefully set the glass on the table. “I would love to live in a world where we could find root causes for everything. That would be so great. Unfortunately, I live in the real world where things are messy.”

Bill took out a car key from his pocket and placed it in the middle of the table. “Let’s ignore the electronic parts of this key for a second. Imagine it’s a key to an old-fashioned car. We can hold it, we can view it from all sides, and, most importantly, we can reason about the way that it works. We can hold a very simple mental model of the key in our heads.

“Now let’s think about a car. It has a lot more parts than just this key. It’s considerably more complicated than the key, but it’s still possible to know pretty much all there is to know about the car—especially if it’s an antique one, like a Model T. A good mechanic, after working with these cars for a while, could build a pretty realistic mental model of how they function and break down. It would be considerably more nuanced than the mental model for the key, because it might have to deal with external realities like the weather, or the type of fuel that could affect the functioning of the car. But it would match the complexity of the car itself. The way that the mechanic would think about a complicated antique car would be sufficiently complicated.”

“Wouldn’t you say,” Linda interrupted, “that Mike is like an experienced mechanic? He knew all there ...