From: Jasper
Date: October 18, 2005
Time: 12:09 AM
Solitairea1, …This sort of thing is what made it so tough to do the Faye piece of the flow chart. Every inch of the way I was confronted with complex stories that had to be crosschecked, sequenced, unraveled, rechecked, unraveled and sequenced again. This stuff begins to run together in your head. There is no telling what you will write at some points because you are trying to write one thing while fifteen related things are competing for attention in your mind. I laughed when you wrote your correction to your correction because I did that more times than I can count on the text of the Faye Resnick puzzle piece BEFORE you and Rovaan found the mistakes that I missed. …..Get used to it. It’s the nature of the beast. …..Faye, Dunne and Fuhrman can get away with telling the whoppers they tell because of something I discovered in college when I was using the Protestant Reformation to clarify an elusive point about another big political change. Somehow I got Martin Luther and John Calvin out of sequence. Everything I wrote about them flowed so well that I was astounded to learn when I was checking the details that none of it could be true. …….This was my first practical lesson in the power of the Primacy Effect, the tendency to accept the first answer that brings order to a confusing situation. You don’t have to understand the details; a good story on its face is usually good enough. And once you have it, it’s a bear to get rid of it. You just keep adding details that confirm it. The conflicting details are usually forgotten. In other words, the work we do here with all the stumbling and corrections to corrections to get to something that makes sense is far from the norm. ……The obvious evidence of O.J. Simpson’s guilt on Bundy and Rockingham set most of us up to accept the version of events leading to the murder of Ron and Nicole the way Faye Resnick told it. The only details that counted were the ones that implicated O.J. Fuhrman, Dunne, Shipp and Denise did the same thing. It’s so hard to get the critical details of their stories to line up that most people don’t even try. –Jasper