The Tao of the Container Snipers

On discounting perception

Image created with DALL-E 3

For about a decade, possibly longer, my family has maintained a sacrosanct group text called “Container Snipers.”

The rules of the grext are simple: Whenever one selects the perfectly sized Tupperware for a given heap of leftovers, one is obliged to send photographic evidence for evaluation by a jury of one’s peers siblings/parents/grandmother. Extra points are awarded for irregularly shaped solids, or consolidating items from multiple serving platters into a single receptacle. (Once, in a moment of ecstatic insight to rival Pythagoras himself, I Tupped a piece of flank steak along the hypotenuse of a seemingly insufficient container. These are the snipes that come once or twice in a lifetime.)

For the uninitiated, here are some prototypical submissions I found in my camera roll while drafting this post:

🎵Snipe it once, snipe it twice, sniping chicken Tups and rice 🎵

As it turns out, there is an ancient, arcane trick for accurately estimating the correct size of a Tupperware—a trick passed down through the generations, from the very dawn of plastics; in just a couple sentences I’m going to let you in on it. Buckle up.

…

(You might want to be sitting down for this.)

The trick is: Whatever container looks like it’s perfect is actually too big. Go down a size.¹

The key insight here is to solve the problem not by changing your perception but by systematically discounting your perception. This is an approach that extends to many other domains. For example, it never really feels like it will take you forty-five minutes to write a single email, or like you’re blowing an issue out of proportion just because you have low blood sugar, or like you’re biased to think people who talk more in meetings have better ideas. But if you learn to look at these situations from an outside perspective you can (to some extent) preempt or counteract faulty perception.

Among many strategies (each appropriate to different contexts) here are a few common methods for discounting perception:

• Using a reference class (e.g., find survey results on how long it takes the average person to write an email)

• Gathering your own data and use it as a sanity check (e.g., put on a stopwatch every time you write an email, and keep a log of the averages)

• Using rules, heuristics, or formulas (e.g., whenever possible, avoid tackling serious problems on an empty stomach)

• Using debiasing protocols² (e.g., have everyone write down an idea independently in the meeting before inviting public deliberation)

These strategies aren’t foolproof—not least because sometimes your perception is accurate. But with practice, you can get better at recognizing the situations where your intuition is untrustworthy, and try to counteract it.³

I’m thinking of all this now not only because it’s a preoccupation of mine but also because of the recent passing of renowned psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in the study of human (mis)judgment and (ir)rationality. “No one enjoys being wrong,” Kahneman was quoted a few years ago as saying, “but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.”

It can indeed be unsettling to learn that our perception is flawed—not only because we don’t like to admit fault, but also (and perhaps more so) because we’re disturbed by the idea that the evidence of our senses is not how the world truly is. Try as we might, we can’t intuit the right Tupperware—we just learn to correct for our flawed selection. We can’t see that the lines are the same length—we just learn to grab a ruler:

The famous Müller-Lyer illusion (image source)

The Tao of the Container Snipers is an antidote to this oh-so-human anxiety: It says that no points are awarded for a good first guess. Indeed, victory is all the sweeter when you resist your intuition and are later proven right for having done so—when you develop a meta-intuition about when to trust your intuition. In the end, the winners are crowned when the lid goes snap.

1. CAUTION: If transferring from a very wide/shallow dish, this rule of thumb may not hold—a lesson I learned the hard way during the infamous #PumpkinSeedGate of 2019:

2. I mean bias here in the sense of “cognitive/perceptual errors,” not social prejudices.

3. In some cases, it may even be possible to shift your perception by repeatedly discounting it. You may have had this experience when playing a new sport where, say, all your throws or shots miss to the left; to counteract this, you start aiming to the right of your target every time; eventually “aiming to the right” starts to feel to you as if you’re shooting straight. (A similar example is manipulating an object as seen through a mirror: At first everything feels backwards, but very quickly you internalize the logic of the looking glass.) That said, I think these cases are the exception rather than the rule—enabled by unusually fast, unambiguous feedback.