Innumeracy
Sad to say, I do not expect the press generally to get numbers right. They get too many much easier things wrong, after all. (True story: my first day on my first journalism job, the desk I was assigned had been completely cleaned out by the previous reporter who was no more, except for a single 3x5 index card, upon which was written, "new - old" over a horizontal division line, underneath which was written, "old.")
But I do expect more out of Rich Lowry, who reviews "The One Percent Doctrine," describing a supposed Cheney "axiom," that "if there is a one-percent chance of a nuclear bomb going off in an American city, the U.S. government has to respond with all the urgency as if there is a 100 percent chance of such an event."
I have enough confidence in Cheney to believe that if in fact he said such a thing, it was because he had so little confidence in his audience that he felt he couldn't state the proposition accurately. Lowry doesn't write for that audience, however.
Don't these people realize the catastrophe of which they speak? It's not a one percent doctrine. It's not even a tenth of a percent doctrine. It might be a hundredth of a percent, but frankly I suspect it's more likely a thousandth, or even less.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 2:29 PM
5 Comments:
Are you saying we should react urgently if there's no more than a one in 100,000 chance of a nuclear bomb going off in America? Such a bomb might kill a million, so if the chance is that low, it's equivalent to killing 10 Americans. That's pretty serious, but is it enough to run our foreign policy on?
Besides, two can play at this game. What if the worst global warming scenarios have a one in a thousand chance of happening, but would kill or seriously hurt many many Americans. Does that mean we should do everything we can to stop it? Remember, steps we take, both to prevent nuclear bombs being dropped and to stop global warming are always uncertain no matter the danger.
Who do you think you are, Posner?
One of my favorite poll questions, I'll just paraphrase here because I'm too lazy to look it up, is from around the time of the 1988 campaign, P.J. O'Rourke used it "Parliament of Whores," I think, or "All the Trouble in teh WOrld," or both, “protecting the environment is so important that requirements and standards can’t be too tight, and continual environmental improvements must be made regardless of cost.” 80 percent agreed. (He also said the national government's first agriculatural policy was to shoot farmers, and this is a case where they got it right the first time.) (I looked it up after all; but I'm still lazy.)
So, what you're saying is, a one in 100 chance of a nuclear bomb going off is a reasonable threshold for action? Or at least, it's not too lenient, maybe we could relax it a bit, say, 1 in 80?
Maybe we should create a government commisssion to determine the correct way of figuring odds of various things occurring in course of life--the only person I have ever known to be reasonable sure of such prognostications was Mr. Spock in the original Star Trek and even his calculations (c'mon Mr. Spock, this is a one hour action- there's way better chance than 7000 to 1 that he and Cap'n Kirk will single-handedly defeat the larger beter-armed Klinggon garrison.
Anonymous directly above may think he's joking, but I believe this is exactly what Posner has suggested. Maybe not a commission, but that we should figure out the odds of things, even rare events like meteors striking earth, and act accordingly.
Dollars to donuts there's already some file stuffed into some cabinet, somewhere between our shining city on the swamp and that big pentagonal black hole of GDP, containing some nitwit "secret" commission's report precisely enumerating the odds of not only a nuclear attack but also chem-, bio-, and pretty much any other type of attack.
No, it simply ISN'T POSSIBLE that it doesn't already exist! Of course that's no reason to NOT do it, again; make a big circus show out of it (think 9/11 comission: "um, well, we kinda figured out that we REALLY weren't prepared for something like 300-ton explosive lawn darts. And besides that, we just didn't realized they were THAT pissed off.") if for no other reason than to show just how on-the-ball our mighty, far-seeing, courageous fed really is.
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