Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Really smart persons continue to blunder. How?

I read this article recently about how women are hurt more often and more severely than men in automobile accidents. Why does this happen?

The crash dummies used in safety tests work well, but are almost always the size and shape of a man. Crash dummies the size and shape of women are rarely used. More than half the persons riding in automobiles are females, yet we predominantly test for males.

How can we be this stupid?

Facial recognition systems don’t recognize black faces as well as white faces. This is because we don’t use many non-white faces in training these systems. The percentage of non-white faces in America grows and grows, but we don’t use these.

How can we be this stupid?

I could go on with more examples from recent and distant history. We blunder and botch these things that anyone who doesn’t know anything about the specialties can understand as stupidity. The experts simply don’t see the most basic thing.

It is a great idea to have an outsider, someone who doesn’t know anything about what we are doing, walk in the door, look around, and ask, “Why aren’t you…?”