The Truth About Making Smart Decisions by Robert E. Gunther

Author:Robert E. Gunther
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Pearson Education Limited (US titles)
Published: 2008-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Part V: The Truth About Data

Truth 25. Listen for the dog that doesn't bark

I recently had the opportunity to kayak down the Grand Canyon. There are plenty of real problems to worry about in that area. There are scorpions and 14 different kinds of rattlesnakes in the underbrush; a bite from any one of which might lead to a long and expensive helicopter ride out to a hospital. There are cliffs and rocks with the potential for broken limbs. And that's in addition to some of the biggest water in the West, which offers at least a small threat of drowning. In other words, my Grand Canyon kayaking trip offered plenty of ways to be injured or killed.

What actually almost killed me had nothing to do with the risks that I had identified before I left. It was not rattlesnakes or Class 10 rapids. (They use a different scale on the Colorado River.) It was a simple toe infection that came from wearing water shoes for 17 days. When I returned, I had such a severe infection that one toe swelled to three times its normal size. My doctor said I was at risk for a blood infection and probably should have been hospitalized. A series of horse needles full of antibiotics in my rear finally brought it under control. The dangers I had factored into my decision and that I had planned for were not the ones that I should have worried about most.

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous short story Silver Blaze, about the theft of a racehorse by the same name and the murder of its trainer, Sherlock Holmes points out to a Scotland Yard detective "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." The detective replies, "The dog did nothing in the night-time." And Holmes replies, "That was the curious incident." The dog didn't bark because the beast knew the thief and murderer, which narrowed the list of suspects.

While Holmes is a fictional character, this type of information has serious implications in the real world. We are usually looking for the obvious signs—the smoking gun, the barking dog, the rushing rapids. We don't often ask ourselves, "What information is missing?" Sometimes, as with the barking dog, the missing information is just not there. Other times, there are people around us who make deliberate attempts to obscure it.

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