The calculation has changed
by John Krehbiel on 3 March 2013
As humans developed self-awareness, we developed a tendency to ascribe agency- see definition 3 here- to things that do not in fact have agency. We anthropomorphize animals all the time, ascribing human thought patterns to cats, dogs, even fish.
Most of the time this does no harm, especially compared to the converse. It is unlikely to hurt you to think that a boulder tumbling down a hill was maliciously trying to smash your noggin, but if you thought that the lion you saw was as intentionally inert as a cloud, you’d be its lunch.
But now we live in a world of instant communication, a 24-7 news barrage. When something bad happens, or might have happened, or was planned to happen, we hear about it right away. So we think there is an ax murderer lurking in every public toilet. A rapist behind every bush. A slightly higher crime rate in an area translates into certain death for anyone foolish enough to go there.
And so now, we get this kind of nonsense. Some idiot mishears a ringtone, and a school goes on lockdown, because, after all, every random noise is a death threat, right?
I think maybe the calculus of these things has changed. We might be better off thinking that a lion is a cloud than thinking that everything is a life-threatening malevolence.
“You can’t be too safe” has become a harmful lie.
-- 2013-03-03 » John Krehbiel
3 March 2013 @ 8:47 am
In my opinion you tend to express possible things from some evolutionary theory as if they’re certain, but aside from that you may be on to something here.
Of course people vary in the degree to which they ascribe agency to things. It seems to me the phenomenon is similar to how people differ in assuming motives in others, so a possible test case of your theory might be whether a group of people with Aspergers do better or worse in the modern world.
Also, even if the general population were to decrease in this “assigning agency” trait, you’d still have hysterics who would sound the alarm over something
Perhaps we would be better off if people were less
Ikely to jump to the conclusion that “somebody” is responsible, but how would you test that? It’s also quite possible we would be far worse off — e.g., maybe we wouldn’t be able to function as a society.
3 March 2013 @ 9:06 am
The point is that there has to be some rational, reasoned response.
We take off our shoes in planes because some idiot tried to light plastic explosive with a match. It is simply not possible to set off plastic explosives with fire. But we get the response “But what if it HAD worked?!”
OK, so I’ll threaten Congress that if they don’t get their act together I will use my Quantum Transmogrifyer to convert my entire body into pure energy, destroying the entire East coast.
Only an idiot would seriously respond to such a threat. But that’s where we are; a nation run by idiots.
3 March 2013 @ 9:15 am
And it turns out the actual story is even worse than the Post made it appear.
The receptionist should be jailed for calling in a false alarm.
3 March 2013 @ 4:42 pm
Being stupid and panicky is not a crime. It is only a crime to knowingly register a false alarm or make a false report. Whatever else this woman was, she did not make the report knowing that there was no danger — she clearly believed that there was. Stupid, yes, criminal, no.
3 March 2013 @ 4:45 pm
We are rapidly moving in the direction of not being able to function as a society *because* people believe lethal nonsense like “you can’t be too safe.” While it obviously would be destructive to lose a certain level of fear, perhaps even a somewhat irrational level, there is clearly a danger in the other direction of letting every potential danger becoming a threat which brooks no cost in prevention.
3 March 2013 @ 7:10 pm
it is impossible for 100% of 911 calls to be made correctly. There will be errors. They will either be type I errors (false positives, false alarms) or they will be type II errors (false negatives, ignoring emergencies).
We want to encourage people to pick up the phone when they think there might be an emergency. That means we need to tolerate type I error. That means that occasionally someone will call 911 with complaints about McDonald’s drive-through service. we cannot afford to train all our citizens to sort out real emergency. It is much more efficient for us to train professional emergency personnel to make the determination.
4 March 2013 @ 1:16 pm
But just because someone calls 911 does not meet a drastic response has to be made. I don’t have a problem with people being “allowed” to report non-emergencies, but the kind of horrible risk management that says “better safe than sorry no mater what” cannot be allowed to control policy on when and how 911 calls are responded to.
When a school official calls 911 to report that a kid’s voice mail ID message has something threatening in it, the police can come in and look for the kid and arrest him for the crime of doing something innocent and being misheard, or the police can come and talk to the people who witnessed the disturbing behavior and figure out whether the kid needs to be confronted, how severely he should be confronted, or whether the principal needs to be told to calm down. Since a voicemail ID message is not presumably recorded 15 seconds before someone calls and hears it, it is nonsense to assume it is a “seconds count until we can drag this kid away” type of threat, even if it was “Hi, I’m John Jones, and I think the principal should be shot.”
11 March 2013 @ 4:00 pm
[This comment didn't belong in this thread. I moved it. -- Greg]