Sunday, June 20, 2010

Just Guess. But You Better Guess Right!

Ben Goldacew at Bad Science has news of an alarming legal issue in Italy in the wake of the tragic earthquake in L'Aquila in April last year.

The L’Aquila Prosecutor’s office have now leapt into action. They have a Commissione Grandi Rischi, after all – a “Commission on Big Risks” – and it’s full of seismologists. If these people can’t predict an earthquake, then what’s the point of them? And so these seismologists are now being indicted and investigated for manslaughter, on account of their failure to warn the population that an earthquake was coming.

Yikes. Talk about a chilling effect. Thinking about going in seismology? Maybe don't work for the Commissione Grandi Rischi.

I mean, yes, if there's any way that they could reasonably have known there was an earthquake coming, and they just neglected to check, or to tell anyone--that would be bad.

But as the post also notes, "It would be great if we could have firm predictions about every risk whose rare but tragic outcome cannot be accurately predicted, whether it is a flu outbreak, a murder, an illness, or an earthquake. Most of us recognise that this is impossible."

There are things you just can't see coming. Blaming people for not seeing things coming that they couldn't have seen coming really seems like scapegoating.

Also, it encourages people to make things up "disaster, right here, on this day!" and then when they're wrong, as they usually will be, it makes everything they say (even the not made up stuff) seem worthless. So there's really a limited benefit, beyond making (some) people feel better, I suppose.

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2 comments:

John B. said...

David Brin writes a lot about the perils of having a professional protector class in place in Western society. It trains the rest of us to be sheepish in the face of a dangerous world. It also puts too many eggs in the prevention basket, and not enough in the resilience basket. Experts are great, and can head off many disasters. Not all, of course, but many. Yet, if we've allowed our resilience to atrophy as a result of dependence on nothing bad ever really happening, then we're in real trouble.

A'Llyn said...

Ah, David Brin. I haven't read anything by him in a long time.

I should read more!