Tomasky wants more focus on results:
Washington is a place where most people care far, far more about process than results. The reasons for this should be obvious. The process is the game. It’s what is ongoing and visible, so it’s the part that people get to judge and assess and gossip about and declaim on. And most people love to make snap judgments, and the more dramatic the better, because that gets you more hits and tweets and so on. I suppose I’m hardly immune to this, being a little cog in this machine myself, but at least I have the ability to step back and observe it and see that it exists and understand that I’m a part of it.
So what happens is, these narratives (Syria is a disaster) get etched into the stone during the process part of the story, before the result even happens.
But McArdle argued last week that judging the process is valid:
Human beings tend to judge failure or success by outcome, rather than process. It’s an easy heuristic, but as in so many things, the easy way out is often disastrous. Having unprotected sex with a short-term partner isn’t a good idea just because you didn’t get pregnant last month, and neither is launching a space shuttle with faulty O-rings because hey, the shuttle didn’t explode last time. In an uncertain world, good decision-making heuristics sometimes have bad outcomes (people get pregnant even if they are using birth control perfectly); bad decision-making heuristics sometimes — maybe even often — produce perfectly fine results. A doctor or nurse who doesn’t wash his or her hands consistently will usually not kill the patient. But failing to wash your hands consistently will kill many patients every year.
The Dish 