Walnuts:

David J. Hand:

>When I was young I was very impressed by how food producers could fill jars with whole walnuts. Somehow they could crack the shells while leaving the nuts intact. Most of the times I tried it, I ended up with mixed pieces of shell and nut, managing to get the nut out whole only once every ten times or so. Later, however, I learned that although the manufacturers had a better success rate than I did, they often ended up with mixed shell and nut pieces, too. But I also learned that they did something else: they selected their results. On those occasions when they were successful, they’d take the whole nuts and stick them in a jar labeled “Whole Walnuts.” And on the other occasions, they’d separate the nut pieces from the shell and stick them in a jar labeled “Walnut Pieces.” (They also had a way of softening the shells so it was easier to get the nut out whole, but I won’t let that get in the way of a good story.) The point here is that I wasn’t seeing the entire picture. I’d assumed that the “whole walnut” jars were the results of all of their efforts, rather than of just a selected subset of them. Indeed, they could have obtained the same results—jars of whole walnuts—even if they’d had only a tiny success rate, one in a thousand, say—by choosing only the successful outcomes to package as whole walnuts.<

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Salopp: Bloß Erfolge sichtbar. Misserfolge verborgen.