When I was a Junior Officer I performed the ritual known as inspecting the troops. Sometimes it could be fun, as when we were returning to port after a long deployment and the guys would put a hat and a pair of shoes on the deck so that I would stop and ask “Who is this?” and they could reply “Seaman Short Sir” or a guy would show up in dungarees with his dress uniform in a dry cleaning bag to prove it was inspection ready. The lesson for me there was, never stop people from acting cute, we all need comedy. Civilians have asked about inspections as if they were some big mystery. Is the officer some incredible genius with a superior attention to detail that ferrets out each flaw? Of course not, the trick is in fact simple. You have six or twenty or forty men lined up. One looks different. Bingo. We learn from new and unexpected information. We learn to recognize outliers from our data set. The ways that our ability to gain knowledge fails fall into (guess how many?) three categories.
1. New situations where we don’t have prior data to measure against.
     Anybody know how to wear the new uniforms?
2. Corruption or collusion among the sample pool.
     Everybody looks the same, wait a second, nobody shaved.
3. Balancing of priorities on the part of the observer.
     The Admiral inspected a fan room and asked one of my men 3 Questions:
        a. Is this your space Son?
        b. Do you know what is wrong in this space?
        c. Am I going to find it?
     The answer was “No Admiral,” the Inspection ended with all of us happy.
OK, add variable number four and call it Schrodinger’s Cat or the GE Effect. There sometimes is or is not new information to discover because you are looking for it.