Analog SFF, September 2010
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Cover design by Victoria Green
CONTENTS
Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE HALO HANDICAP by Stanley Schmidt
Novelette: THAT LEVIATHAN, WHOM THOU HAST MADE by Eric James Stone
Science Fact: BAD MEDICINE: WHEN MEDICAL RESEARCH GOES WRONG by H. G. Stratmann, M.D.
Novelette: PUPA by David D. Levine
Short Story: SPLUDGE by Richard A. Lovett
Short Story: RED LETTER DAY by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Short Story: FLOTSAM by K.C. Ball
Reader's Department: THE ALTERNATE VIEW: I THINK, THEREFORE I QUESTION by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Short Story: THE VIEW FROM THE TOP by Jerry Oltion
Short Story: SANDBAGGING by Kyle Kirkland
Novelette: EIGHT MILES by Sean McMullen
Reader's Department: THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Don Sakers
Reader's Department: BRASS TACKS
Reader's Department: UPCOMING EVENTS by Anthony Lewis
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Vol. CXXX No. 9 September 2010
Stanley Schmidt, Editor
Trevor Quachri, Managing Editor
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Reader's Department: EDITORIAL: THE HALO HANDICAP by Stanley Schmidt
Way back in grade school one of my favorite teachers made what I considered—and still do, even more strongly—a really big pedagogical mistake. We had been working on short division with remainders, like 7 (divided by) 2 = 3, R 1. I breezed through a set of such problems till I came to the one at the end: 1 (divided by) 2. I found out later that I was expected to write 0, R 1, but that never entered my head. I had never before seen a division problem in which the divisor was bigger than the dividend, and I saw it as something fundamentally different. I thought long and hard about what it meant, and finally wrote down 1/2. Imagine my chagrin when she marked it wrong and said, “We'll teach you about fractions next year."
Did nobody teach her to recognize a huge leap and supremely teachable moment when she saw one? In case you're wondering, yes, I did understand what I was saying. I had a solid grasp of the idea that if I had seven candy bars to share with two friends we could each take two and have one left over. It was just as clear to me that if I had one candy bar and had to share it equally with my brother, I would have to break it into two equal pieces. I knew that those pieces were called halves, and I had seen “one half” written as “1/2.” What I had just done was to make, on my own, the connection between that and the formal process of division. It was a major conceptual breakthrough, and my teacher (in my now-professional opinion as a teacher myself) should have found that exciting and looked for a way to run with it.
I could understand if she had said, “That's very good, and we'll teach you more about things like this next year.” But she was just plain wrong to tell me I was wrong, and that bothered me a lot—perhaps more than it should have. I approved highly of most of what she did, so this isolated faux pas disturbed me more than it would have if I'd already written her off as a lousy teacher. It doesn't seem fair that we hold mistakes more strongly against people who don't make many—but we often do.
I would certainly never devote an editorial to complaining about something a long-ago teacher did, but I realized in much-delayed retrospect that my reaction to what she did was a small-scale example of what seems to be a fairly general principle of human nature; and that's what I'm writing about. It seems that our evaluation of other people's behavior is not based on a simple comparison of what they do to what they “should” do in some objective sense, but more on a comparison of what they do to what we expect of them, personally, on the basis of past experience. This has the odd effect—the one I described above as “unfair"—that we'll judge exactly the same action much more harshly if it's done by somebody we know and admire than if it's done by a stranger or someone we already regard as incompetent or unscrupulous. We'll shrug off a lie or theft or drunkenness by somebody who already has a history of that kind of behavior, with an attitude of, “What else would you expect?” But if one of your personal heroes does exactly the same thing, you'll probably be horrified.
Why is that unfair? Well, if we were going to judge all actions in an impartial way, by their consequences, those are exactly the same regardless of who does the deed. So if hero A and scoundrel B do the same bad thing, it's really just one small defect in A's long and otherwise unblemished record, and our overall judgment of A still looks quite good—just not perfect. For B, it's just another data point to reinforce our already low opinion of his character.
But that's not the way it often works. For B, we say it's just another data point and attach little significance to it. For A, we often act, at least for a while, as if that one blemish has wiped out all the earlier examples of merit.
We might call this effect the “halo handicap": a person who is seen as too virtuous is likely to suffer much more for even a small isolated misstep than someone who is already perceived as prone to big ones. The reason seems to be that people become used to getting what they want from a particular source so much of the time that they expect it all the time, and get seriously bent out of shape when that doesn't happen.
That kind of thinking—or feeling—doesn't just color our attitudes toward individuals, but toward companies, other institutions, and even whole civilizations.
And it can have destructive consequences.
For a corporate-level example, consider the recent troubles of the Toyota company. What has actually happened here? There have been, in a short recent period, a couple of recalls for problems with sticking accelerators and brakes, promptly followed by such media coverage as Time magazine's cover line reading, “Toyota: The Fall of an Icon,” to draw readers’ attention to an article further blurbed with, “It was the world's most admired automaker . . . What can other firms learn from a corporate culture that went horribly wrong?"
Far be it from me to suggest that sticky-accelerator and brake problems are not to be taken seriously. They can injure and even kill people, and there is some evidence that these have, in at least a few cases. Certainly Toyo
ta needs to find out what went wrong and correct it, and they're working on that. Some have suggested that they're not correcting it as effectively as they could, and even that may be true.
But let's put things in perspective. “Fall of an icon” and “went horribly wrong” suggest, rather sensationally, that it's all over for Toyota and a once-excellent company has suddenly become a terrible company no longer worthy of any trust. A better statement of the facts as I understand them (in February) would be that a company long known for making hardly any mistakes has finally made a couple. Most other companies in the same business have made so many comparable ones that had they made these, the news stories about them would have been headed, far less prominently, “More recalls from Motors; details on p. 6."
In case any of you have no personal experience with Toyotas, let me illustrate with my own. My wife and I have, as of this writing, owned three Toyotas (all bought used) for a total of 22 vehicle-years. I will now recite their complete combined record of repairs (as distinct from routine preventive maintenance or body work necessitated by falling trees and the like):
Replaced one muffler clamp to prevent muffler from dragging.
Replaced one exhaust flex coupling to keep a barely noticeable noise from getting worse.
That's it.
By comparison, every one of the numerous other cars we've owned or habitually driven has needed at least a couple of significant mechanical or electrical repairs—ranging from distributor caps and washer motors to a transmission rebuild—every year. That pattern was so typical of not only our experience but also many people's that most of the car owners I've known considered it par for the course. So you can see that, at least in our experience, Toyota reliability is not just enough better than most of the competition that you can see it if you look closely at the statistics, it's so qualitatively obvious as to be in a totally different league.
So Toyota owners, having been lulled into thinking they can expect something very close to perfection, think they should be able to count on it absolutely all the time—which is neither realistic nor, in my earlier word, fair.
Please note carefully that I'm not saying that I think Toyota can do no wrong. Clearly they did do something wrong in these two cases*, and I'll be as disappointed as anybody—maybe more so, since I'd like to keep being able to get cars as reliable as the ones I've gotten from them so far—if these occurrences turn out to be the beginning of a real slide in standards. That's a real possibility; the current recession has led many (if not most) companies to cut corners, and I know no reason to assume that this one is immune to the temptation. I'll be watching carefully to see how things develop. After all, the next time I need to buy a car (which I don't expect to be soon) I'll probably go back to this company if it still seems the most likely source of the reliability I want. And I won't if it doesn't.
But in the meantime, I think it's seriously premature to think that two recalls, or even some glitches in dealing with them, prove that the company has abandoned its dedication to quality or lost its ability to deliver it. All two close-together data points prove is that a company that has long been far above its competitors is not quite as far above them as some people liked to believe. It, too, can make mistakes; maybe it was overdue for some. But unless and until more data points have accumulated that define a real downward curve, nothing more can be reasonably concluded.
But if customers panic and abandon them without waiting to see whether that happens, they may have trouble restoring and maintaining their accustomed reliability.
The same considerations apply, with new variations, at the level of whole civilizations. Our own culture, despite its members’ incessant complaining about a wide variety of concerns, has come to take for granted such a high standard of safety and comfort that many of us find it increasingly hard to imagine making do with anything less and are inclined to become frantic at the slightest deviation from what we expect. In discussions of water conservation, for example, nobody ever makes the obvious suggestion that people take showers every two or three days instead of every day. And I've heard people seriously suggest that space missions should not be undertaken until they can be made perfectly safe.
A daily shower is nice, but it's a luxury unthinkable through much of history—and, even today, through much of the world. New technologies cannot be made highly safe and reliable without first experimenting with less refined versions, which is inherently dangerous.
Such attitudes can easily bring progress to a gradual halt by making people dependent on things they don't really need, and by making them afraid to try anything new. They can do even more than that, by making civilization less resilient—less able to recover from a catastrophic collapse. If we lose our massive technological infrastructure, how many people would have either the skill or the patience to go back to doing things in the hard ways that most of our ancestors had to use? My guess is: not very many. (Maybe the silver lining in that is that the few who could would again have a real advantage, and natural selection would again have a chance to work on a populace where it's had little chance to during the long period of an artificially leveled playing field. . . .)
Let's hope that it doesn't come to that, and we don't have to find out. But in the meantime, we would all do well to remind ourselves occasionally that even if we've come to expect near-perfection from somebody or something, we can't realistically expect it all the time. And if a greatly admired person or institution occasionally slips, we should not treat that as a more detestable failing in them than in somebody who does it all the time.
Copyright © 2010 Stanley Schmidt
* At least, if the reported failures really happened as claimed. Since this was written, at least some of them have been called into serious question.
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Novelette: THAT LEVIATHAN, WHOM THOU HAST MADE by Eric James Stone
Some of the best teaching is by example, but isn't always planned!
Sol Central Station floated amid the fusing hydrogen of the solar core, 400,000 miles under the surface of the Sun, protected only by the thin shell of an energy shield, but that wasn't why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station's multidenominational chapel. As a life-long Mormon I had been speaking in church since I was a child, so that didn't make me nervous, either. But this was my first time speaking when non-humans were in the audience.
The Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only six human members, including me and the two missionaries, but there were forty-six swale members. As beings made of plasma, swales couldn't attend church in the chapel, of course, but a ten-foot widescreen monitor across the back wall showed a false-color display of their magnetic force-lines, gathered in clumps of blue and red against the yellow background representing the solar interior. The screen did not give a sense of size, but at two hundred feet in length, the smallest of the swales was almost double the length of a blue whale. From what I'd heard, the largest Mormon swale, Sister Emma, stretched out to almost five hundred feet—but she was nowhere near the twenty-four-mile length of the largest swale in our sun.
"My dear Brothers and Sisters,” I said automatically, then stopped in embarrassment. The traditional greeting didn't apply to all swale members, as they had three genders. “And Neuters,” I added. I hoped my delay would not be noticeable in the transmission. It would be a disaster if in my first talk as branch president, I alienated a third of the swale population.
A few minutes into my talk on the topic of forgiveness, I paused when a woman in a skinsuit sauntered through the door and down the aisle. The skinsuit was a custom high-fashion one, not standard station issue, with active coloration that showed puffy white clouds floating across the sky on her breasts, and waves lapping against the sandy beach at her hips. She took a seat on the second row and gazed up at me with dark brown eyes.
The ring finger of her left hand was unadorned.
I forced my eyes away from her and looked down at my
notes for the talk. While trying to find my place again, I couldn't help thinking that maybe this woman was an answer to my prayers. The only human female listed in the branch membership records was sixty-four years old and married. As far as I knew, there wasn't an unmarried Mormon human woman within ninety million miles in any direction, which limited my dating pool rather severely.
Maybe this woman was Mormon, but not on the membership records yet because, like me, she was a recent arrival on Sol Central. It seemed a little unlikely, as a member would probably dress more appropriately for church. Maybe she wasn't a member but was interested in joining.
By sheer willpower, I managed to focus on my talk enough to finish it coherently. After the closing hymn and prayer, I straightened my tie and stepped down from the podium to introduce myself to the new arrival.
"Hello,” I said, offering my hand. “I'm Harry Malan.” I caught a whiff of her perfume, something that reminded me of strawberries.
Her hand was dry and cool, and I regretted not having wiped my palm on my suit first.
"Dr. Juanita Merced,” she said. “You're the new leader of this congregation?"
I felt a twinge of disappointment. A member would have asked if I was the branch president. “I am. How can I help you?"
"You can stop interfering with my studies.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, but her eyes looked at me defiantly.
"Sorry,” I said. “I'm afraid I have no idea who you are or what studies I might be interfering with."
"I'm a solcetologist.” I must have given her a blank look, because she added, “I study solcetaceans—the swales."
"Oh.” I knew there were scientists who objected to what they believed was interference with the culture of the swales, but I had thought that since the legal right to proselytize the swales had been established two years ago, the controversy had been settled. I was obviously wrong. “I regret that you feel your studies are being compromised, Dr. Merced, but the swales are intelligent beings with free will, and I believe they have the right to choose their religious beliefs."