Martha Gimbel used to work at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) and has noticed that a new report for the CEA has some unusual interns:
The Economic Report of the President has revealed that the quality of interns at CEA is much better than it was when I was there….we never got cool ones like Steve Rogers, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Aunt May, and John Cleese pic.twitter.com/qELM2729os
— Martha Gimbel (@marthagimbel) March 19, 2019
This falls under the “Brown M&M” principle, whereby small failures on the margins might point to larger problems. As Vox explains:
These are small matters, of course, but inattention to detail as a habit can be very consequential.
Van Halen used to famously insist that the band be provisioned before playing a show with bowls of M&Ms from which all the brown M&Ms had been removed. This would be buried in the midst of a longish contract document, and the point wasn’t to be fussy about candy; it was to offer a quick way to check whether the organizers had actually read the thing and paid attention to detail.