Four Right and Two Wrong

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town the man you asked for a fact had a face, and you could read in it whether he knew. This one borrows your century, where the answering is done by something with no face at all.

Two sash window restorers in one town, the same pine and the same linseed putty.
Both bought the same machine that answers questions, in the same wet January.
Both set it to the same work, the quotations and the care notes.
One of them began by asking it six things he knew the answer to already.
Same machine thereafter, and only one went back to a house for nothing.
Which of the two knew what he had bought?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two sash window restorers in the town I have never named, though this one has electricity in it. Box frames opened up, rotten bottom rails renewed, the sashes re-corded and the glass re-puttied. Twenty years apiece. Both began using the machine that answers questions in the same January, chiefly for the writing: quotations, letters, and the care notes that go out with every finished job.

The first man was not careless, which is worth saying before anything else. He read what the machine gave him and corrected it where he knew better. In February he asked it for a care sheet for a householder whose windows he had just finished, and it came back with some thirty small facts in it, each in the same even and obliging tone. Twenty-nine were sound. The thirtieth said the new putty could be painted after two or three days. He would himself have said a fortnight in that weather, but he was in a hurry, and a paragraph sure of itself is a hard thing to interrupt.

The householder, a tidy and obedient sort of man, painted on the third day. By the end of March the paint had wrinkled and crazed along every putty line in the house and the putty beneath was still soft. Our man went back for two days in a wet spring, scraped out eleven panes of his own work and did them again, and said nothing.

The second man did one thing the first did not, and it cost him forty minutes in his first week. Before he let the machine write a word to a customer he asked it six questions he already knew the answers to. Not clever questions. Dull ones, out of his own hands: what a litre of that paint covers, how long linseed putty wants before painting, what weight of cord suits a given sash, how the beads come off a house of that date without splitting, and two besides.

Four came back right. The putty answer came back as two days. The cord answer gave a cord too light for the weight, which is a broken cord inside a year. And the sixth, a method of taking off beads described with great assurance, would have split them on a house of that date, which no man could have found out by reading it.

Four right and two wrong, and the two wrong in exactly the same voice as the four right. That was what he had bought, and he wrote the score on a card above the bench. Under it a rule: the machine writes, he checks. Not the prose, which only wants putting back into his own words. The facts. Anything with a figure, a date, a measurement, a name or a point of law in it goes against the thing itself before it leaves the premises: the tin, the maker's sheet, the council's own page. Five minutes of the half hour the machine saves him, and he keeps the rest.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

A machine that answers you is wrong in precisely the same voice it is right in, so there is nothing in the writing for you to catch. You are reading for a signal that is not there.

Consider how you ordinarily detect a man who does not know. He hesitates, he hedges, he says he would want to look it up. We spend our lives learning those signs and go on reading them out of habit at a page. But the evenness of a machine's prose is no evidence about the world. It is produced the same way whatever the truth of the content, and cannot show a doubt it does not hold.

Now the useful half, which is that the errors are not spread evenly though the tone is. These machines are at their best on the broad and the much-written, and at their worst on the particular: a number, a date, a local rule, a measurement, anything recent, anything turning on which year or which make. Which is awkward, since a quotation and a care sheet are made almost wholly of the particular, and the particular is most of what you wanted it for.

So those forty minutes were worth more than any argument about whether such machines may be trusted in general. He marked its homework on ground he owned, and came away knowing the shape of its ignorance in his own trade. You may do the same before Friday, and it is the reason only work you have done by hand often enough to be bored by it is fit to hand to a machine: you cannot mark what you never knew.

You will be told the newer machines are better than this, that they cite their sources and say when they are unsure. There is something in it. But a hedge printed in that same even voice is only more text, and the cost of being wrong lands on the man whose name is at the foot of the page. And the better they get, the less often you catch one, and the less you then look. Nor can you ask the machine to check itself, since nothing happens to it if you turn out to be wrong.

Two cautions. Checking everything puts you back where you started, so the check is aimed: figures, dates, measurements, names, law, and anything a customer will act upon. And six questions tell you about classes of question, not particular sentences. Four out of six is no licence to believe two thirds of anything. It tells you which subjects to distrust.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What has gone out under my name this month unchecked? Mark every figure, date and rule in the last three quotations. That is your real exposure.
2. Which six questions would I set it? Dull ones you could mark in a second. Ask them this week, and again when you change machines.
3. What will the customer do with this sentence? A paragraph on how a box frame is made can be wrong at nobody's cost. A line telling him when to paint will be obeyed.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of the two knew what he had bought?

The second, and the knowledge cost him forty minutes. He had bought a quick, tireless, well-mannered writer with an uneven grasp of fact and no way of showing which parts are which. The first bought the same thing and took it for an authority, on no evidence beyond its manner. One householder painted on the third day.

The verse:

Four were right and two were not
and all six read the same,
so mark its paper on your own
before it signs your name.

Until next time. Go and set your machine six questions you know the answer to already, and write the score on a card where you will see it.

P.S. The answers to fear are not the absurd ones. A figure out by a factor of ten announces itself and you will laugh and correct it. Two days instead of a fortnight passes a busy man at nine in the evening and costs him two days in a wet March. The nearly right is the whole of the danger, so check hardest what looks most reasonable, which is unnatural and must therefore be a rule.

Also in the archive: Word for Word, The Yard He Had Left and Everything but the Name.