February 15, 2010

• catastrophe prediction

  Catastrophe prediction is probably the one most thankless job in the world.

  Consider the Y2K problem. This was talked up enormously in the media prior to the year 2000. The closer it got to 2000 the bigger a “story” it became. Then… when the year 2000 happened, virtually nothing happened. A few minor bugs were fixed and everything was fine.

  But there’s two ways that story can be told. Was it, say evil people overselling a point, directly manipulating people for some nefarious unknown purpose? Perhaps it was a conspiracy to create more jobs for old COBOL programmers or maybe just the age old plot to make government bigger and more powerful so it can encroach on our lives all the more.

  OR, maybe it was somewhat simpler. Maybe some well meaning individuals who actually knew something about programming realized there was a problem early and started sounding the alarm early. Thanks to their efforts organizations got afraid so they hired new workers and spent the man hours to correct the problem wherever it occurred. The alarm continued to be sounded right up until the turn of the year largely because it can be hard to say for certain whether and where the problem has been fixed. Each institution acted independently to shore up their code base and considering the radical complexity of the many systems we rely upon there was always the possibility that something important could have been missed. It was thanks to the concerted effort of many individuals responding appropriately to a serious warning that catastrophe was averted.

  Two different stories. Same observed outcome. What is the truth?

  Well one thing is for sure, it’s the FIRST story that remains in the public consciousness. It’s the first story that everybody remembers. I hear it all the time. People laugh about “Y2K” and use it as an example of fear mongering and “crying wolf”. And not just laypeople too. Programmers I hear laugh and joke about this as much or more than I hear regular citizens. Deniers tend to provide one of two arguments: 1. “nothing happened when the new year rolled in so there must not have been a problem” and 2. “well it was really easy to fix in MY organization so the problem must have been way overstated”.

  Both arguments are based on very shaky evidence and strange logic. In the first, it should be obvious that the fact that nothing did happen is no kind of evidence at all that nothing COULD have happened. It’s quite possible that nothing happened because the problem was fixed. In the second, it tends to to rely on a very narrow view of the problem due to a limited perspective focused on your own organization and your own experiences. Just because your job didn’t involve dealing with difficult y2k coding issues, does not imply that no such difficult y2k coding issues actually existed. What’s more even if the problem wasn’t or didn’t turn out to be as large as it appeared to be at first, doesn’t mean people didn’t have good reasons for believing there was a big problem in the first place. To make a really good argument against the response to y2k you’d have to analyze those actual reasons and show conclusively that on a whole it was unjustified fear mongering.

  But those perspectives have clout. People remember them. Y2K will ever be imprinted on the consciousness of many as an exaggerated hoax regardless of what the truth is. And those who predicted it, whose predictions it could be argued saved us from untold economic harm are given no thanks for their efforts and are likely ridiculed as “alarmists”.

  Maybe you don’t buy it in the case of Y2K because you think that really WAS a hoax.  But there are numerous other examples.

  Take for example the risk of aerosols destroying the O-zone layer. Again, there was a serious risk there according to scientists who study the matter. One way you can tell the story is “alarmists worried about nothing and now all of a sudden notice how they aren’t talking about it anymore! There must never have been a problem in the first place!”  But another way to tell the story is that the US, where most of these dangerous particles were being produced implemented a law that created a cap and trade system to limit to the pollutants. This encouraged most companies to switch out to less dangerous alternatives that became available. And BAM! Catastrophe averted.  But those who predicted it still deemed liars and pretenders by the highly skeptical public that lack the knowledge or the expertise to confirm or deny the predictions.

  Here’s an example where the opposite occurred.  Take the economic crises we’re facing now. There were MANY economists who predicted various components of the crises from the housing downturn to the financial crises to the derivatives crash. Some even predicted ALL of these components. Many were sounding the alarm early and often. Yet… in this case… nobody listened. So then, exactly as predicted, the economy collapsed. So you’d THINK the people who predicted it would be praised and elevated into positions of authority so they can prevent such a thing from ever happening again right?

  Nope. They remain outcasts. Not only do they have to deal with, personally, the effects of the apocalypse that they failed to prevent, but they also have become complaining to them that they didn’t sound the alarm louder, that they weren’t serious enough, and that they didn’t try hard enough. People come up with excuses saying they didn’t really understand the financial situation and were just making stuff up because they’re natural “contrarians” and “naysayers” who were just trying to get in everyone’s way. People make excuses for the people who didn’t listen saying “how could they have known?” and “nobody could have predicted” even as the people who DID predict it are tearing their hair out in frustration.  And of course the very same people who made the colossal mistakes resulting in the financial collapse are elevated to positions of power where they assure everyone that they can “fix” it.

  A similar story can be told about the dot comm bust or any other financial collapse or recession throughout history. A similar story can even be told about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For as much as people don’t like to talk about it, there were predictions that the US was vulnerable to an attack and that there were specific people wanting to attack us. And there was a whole body of literature discussing the ways in which our foreign policy increases the likelihood of our being attacked. There are even those who thought up the idea of using commercial airlines as weapons. It was not some far flung possibility.  There were catastrophe predictors there too. But as with all catastrophe predictors they get little or no love.

  Katrina is a similar story too. Many experts begged the government to pay attention to the levies years before the hurricane hit that flooded New Orleans. They predicted that the levies could not handle the storm surge and needed to be rebuilt or we’d have a horrible disaster on our hands. But the army core of engineers was off building roads in Iraq and Afghanistan and everyone assumed they were just overstating the case. They weren’t. Tragedy did strike. Haiti can be seen in a similar light since there was reason to believe that severe nasty earthquake would hit there in the near future. It did. No amount of prediction could encourage the world to pay attention and do anything to prepare for the eventuality.

  And now… well we continue to ignore potential oncoming predictable disasters and just assume that things will be just fine while we continue to spend so much of our resources on other countries across the world that did not even ask for our help. The predictors are no more esteemed now than they were before their predictions were vindicated.

  Need more examples? Think about the swine flu or any kind of viral epidemic. There are those who spoke out loudly about the risks and have been doing so for many years. Governments listen and put into place very complex reaction systems and spend a lot of money stockpiling antivirals and trying to make their system for dealing with whatever happens as efficient as possible. But do they overreact sometimes? Sure. That doesn’t mean however that we aren’t immeasurably better off BECAUSE we reacted to the possibility of a catastrophe swiftly and surely than we would have been had we been caught entirely with our pants down. But now, since the Swine-Flu wasn’t nearly as bad as some of the bad predictions were, people generally just assume that it was all a big silly hoax. And the next time there’s an epidemic people will say the same thing. They’ll argue for no response and doing nothing and call the catastrophe predictors whiners or liars or worse. Never does it occur to them that maybe part of the reason the swine flu epidemic WASN’T that horrible was BECAUSE we listened to the people who told us years and years ago that we have to be prepared for the worst in case of a virulent epidemic that could cause untold harm to our society.

  So what’s the real problem?

  Basically people HATE catastrophes. And that’s wholly natural. So nobody WANTS to be told that we’re speeding toward a cliff. We’d all rather think we’re on the right coarse, going fast, having ourselves a good old time. Even if it would be easy and painless to slow down and keep an eye out for any oncoming precipices, we’d rather just keep going. We tell the person looking at the map to keep his trap shut and stop being a downer.

  Sometimes we do turn at the whining person’s urging though and go off on a different road. But then we don’t see the cliff we would have fallen off. So we still assume the whiner was just whining and that we just humored him by taking a different road. We’d prefer to think that everything is and always was a-okay.

  Of course in those cases where we do go flying off, we aren’t inclined to thank the person who told us of our oncoming doom. That just reminds us of how stupid and arrogant we were to ignore him. And at the time we’re too busy nursing our wounds from the collision to be bothered with assigning blame or praising farsightedness. POST-catastrophe is the last time when anyone is thinking about any kind of positive thoughts or willingness to pat anybody on the back. Usually the catastrphe predictor is concerned least of all with taking credit or making his or her own case for themselves.   They too were on the car and they too have their own injuries to nurse as well as a dealing with the guilt of not having found a way to get their fellow riders to choose a different safer course.

  We always prefer to think we are immortal and that our society will persist without end. We like to think we’re really in control of our destiny and that when bad things happen it’s freak chance and accident rather than predictable problems that can be overcome through concerted dedicated effort. 

  And we know full well that it’s a lot easier and safer and more comfortable to simply go along with it even when we see substantial evidence to the contrary.  It’s not a hard logic to follow. IF the catastrophe hits and nobody survives nobody will care that you predicted in the first place. If the catastrophe hits and you do survive nobody will thank you for having been right, likely they’ll hate you for it. And if the catastrophe is averted people will just pretend there was never any real catastrophe ahead in the first place and call you a liar and an “alarmist” for having dared to express an opinion opposed to the status quo.

  That’s the way it goes. We all know it goes that way. Yet why do so many people devote their lives to the thankless job of trying to bring attention to the many problems that can and must be averted?

  Perhaps because it is the right thing to do.  Or perhaps because they believe in what they are saying and maybe they too love this world and this society in which they live so at least if they can make a difference, even if they are never thanked for it, at least they and everyone else will be alive to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

  • 2:38 pm
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