The away-team batter seemed to get a hit. The ball dribbled through the grass just inside of the 3rd base line, the fielder skipping gleefully alongside. His patience was rewarded when the ball crossed over into foul territory just before reaching the base.

I was watching the game on TV, this being The Days Weeks Years of Covid, and the announcers credited the skill of the groundsman with influencing the trajectory of the ball. I exclaimed to my husband, Why doesn’t everyone love baseball, a game with so much depth, detail, nuance? He replied, People don’t like nuance.

Maybe that’s true during leisure time, but we seem obsessed by it in our professions and avocations. Carpenters apparently need hundreds of different screws. Gardeners have mastered subtle details of sprouting, budding, flowering, and ripening for thousands of plants, and they are happy to explain those to you. Morris dancers can spend the better portion of practice analyzing the angle of a hankie flip. Chesley Sullenberger was able to land an airliner in the Hudson River in part because of the hours he spent experimenting with the plane’s responses during the long descent from the High Sierras into SFO.

The danger of not mastering nuance is we make decisions that have the opposite effect from our intentions. I would propose that most cases of unintended consequences could have been avoided with deeper attention to the details of the situation being changed.

Yet mastering nuance can be paralyzing. Especially in emergencies, it is important to take some mitigating action before all the details are clear. Ideally, deep study can proceed in parallel. For Covid-19, for example, on could have started social distancing or quarantining immediately while also gathering data from testing and contact tracing and studying it in the lab. I’ve heard some countries may have done that.

Panic and fear definitely enhance neither our ability nor our proclivity to perceive nuance.

Now for a shoutout to my favorite person who uses observation of nuance in nature to change the world: Jake Fiennes. He noticed things like the same birds sitting on the same poles every day, and by just thinking about things and observing things for a long time before trying things, he became one of the leaders changing the course of modern agriculture, an activity that dumps tons of pollutants and ‘cides into an environment from which it subsequently produces “food.”

Nuanced it’s not.