Warning: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes

Warnings:  Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes by Richard Clarke and RP Eddy

NY:  HarperCollins, 2017

ISBN 978-0-06-248802-2

(3)  What the ancient Greeks called Cassandra behavior today’s social scientists sometimes refer to as sentinel intelligence or sentinel behanvior, the ability to detect danger from warning signs before others see it.  The behavior is observed in a variety of animals, including, we believe, in humans.

(8)  Why we failed to achieve tactical warning is a controversial subject centering on the repeated, conscious decision of senior CIA personnel to prevent the FBI and White House leadership from knowing that the 9/11 hijackers were already in the US.  (A much more detailed discussion of the topic can be found in another of Dick’s previosly published books, Your Government Failed You.)

(170)  The Cassandra Matrix:

The Warning:  Response Availability, Initial Occurrence Syndrome; Erroneus Consensus; Magnitude Overload, Outlandishness, Invisible Obvious

The Decision Makers:  Diffusion of Responsibility, Agenda Inertia, Complexity Mismatch, Idological Response Rejection, Profiles in Cowardice, Satisficing, Inability to Discern the Unusual

The Cassandra:  Proven Technical Expert, Off-Putting Personality, Data DRiven, Orthogonal Thinker, Questioners, Sense of Person Responsability, High Anxiety

The Critics:  Scientific Reticence, Personal of Professional Investment, Non-Expert Rejection, “Now Is Not the Time” Fallacy

Response Availability:  Is this a problem that could be prevented or mitigated with some response?

(171)  In our estimation, no obstacle to action is bigger than Initial Occurrence Syndrome, yet it is the easiest objection to logically assail.

(172)  Most predicted events that would be an initial occurrence suffer from the audience’s availability bias, or lack of past experiences to which to relate the prediction.

(173)  Magnitude Overload:  Overly large-scale events or phenomena can have two negative effects of decision makers.  First, the sheer size of the problem sometimes overwhelms and causes the manager to “shut down.”

… Second, the decision maker may not be able to properly magnify their feelings of dread or empathy for disasters predicated to have massive death and loss.

(174)  This concept is called “scope neglect,” and may best be embodied in Stalin’s dictum, “The death of one man is a tragedy.  The death of millions is a statistic.”

(175)  [Daniel] Simons concluded that even when people are aware or reminded that novel or unusal things can happen, they still do not see them if they are distracted.

(176)  Who owns it?  Frequently, no one wants to own an issue that’s about to become a disaster.  This reluctance creates a “bystander effect,” wherein observers of the problem feel no responibility to act.

(177)  Most organizations and their leadership have an agenda to which they are devotedly attached.  Such groups are subject to Agenda Inertia, a force that concentrates focus on issues already in the plan.

(178)  Complexity mismatch is a looming threat for government.  For the first time, technologists are now building machines that make decisions with rationale that even the creators don’t fully understand.

(179)  If an issue is so complex that no one person fully understands it, there may be an increased likelihood of a Cassandra Event.

(180-181)  The sociologist Herbert Simon coined the term “satisfying” in 1947 to describe searching through the available remedies until an acceptable alternative is found that “addresses” the problem, but doesn’t solve it.  This alternative is usually easy, not requiring significant resources or disruption.

(181)  They [big organizations] often cannot tell the difference between the routine and the dramatic.

(186)  In 2012, psychiatrist Jeremy Coplan, of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, found that generalized anxiety disorder was associated with higher intelligence levels and was not necessarily correlated with neuroses or dysfunctional behavior.  In Israel, Dr Tsachi Ein-Dor drew a similar conclusion, that people with higher anxiety levels tended to detect threats sooner and warn others. 

…  Scientific Reticence:  For some issues, a high scientific standard of proof cannot be met in time to act. 

(195)  The lesson of the Y2K case study is that, if the Cassandra is right and averts the problem by action, there will be those who decry overreaction.  Once cannot always prove such critics wrong, but experiments and models can be used to demonstrate what might have happened in the absence of the response.

NB:  Some climate skeptics and deniers are using the successful avoidance of more acid rain damage as an excuse not to take climate change seriously.

(233)  Laurie Garrett:  “Every single time I try to draw attention to an outbreak, I can tell you the particular time when I will be attacked.  It is always a white male who combines his attack with a comment about my appearance and usually something related to me being a female.  When I was on NPR the other day, someone tweeted about how fat I am.  That is how they discredit my point.  You have to be wearing a skin of steel and be willing to take the barbs and arrows.”

(249)  Hansen believes his latest warning is the most important he has ever issued.  Earth’s current climate is beginning to look a lot like the way it did during the Eemian interglacial, a warm period from about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago.  Then, when the temperature was less tha 1ºC warmer than today, “there is evidence of ice melt, sea-level rise to 5-9 meters [beyond current levels], and extreme storms.”  It gets worse.  Further evidence of rapid sea-level rise in the late Eemian, “[suggests] the possibility that a critical stability threshold was crossed that caused polar ice sheet collapse."

(266)  India detonated its first nuclear weapon in 1974 (Operation Smiling Buddha)…

(271)  One thing that most experts agree on is that Pakistan is producing nuclear weapons faster than any other nation onf Earth.  Four hundred warheads would mean that Pakistan’s nuclear  inventory would surpass not only India’s, but also France’s, the United Kingdom’s, and China’s.  This would mean that Pakistan would have fewer than only the United States and Russia.

(286)  Joe Weiss…. wrote the book… Protecting Industrial Control Systems from Electronic Threats….

(294)  Joe Weiss:  “The Internet of Things introduces new vulnerabilities even without malicious actors.”

(300)  Joe Weiss:  “I have 750 incidents in my database now that have killed over a thousand people [in all]… There have been cyber incidents in almost all of the industrial infrastructures:  electric distribution system, transmission systems, hydro plants, fossil plants, nuclear, combustion-turbine plants, oil and gas pipelines, water and water treatment systems, manufacturing facilities, and transportation.  These are woldwide, not just in the US.  None of this is hypothetical.  It has already occurred."

(316)  David Morrison now says that we can be fairly confident that those extinction-size rocks [asteroids] will not hit us, at least not in the next century or so.

(330)  Scientists have known for decades how to paste together different strands of DNA once they’ve already been cut using an enzyme called DNA ligase.  What was previously missing was a method of easily, accurately, and cheaply cutting existing strands of DNA.  CRISPR/Cas9 is that method, and it can be used successfully to edit the DNA of any type of cell, including plant and animal.

(333)  After its discovery, researchers found that CRISPR/Cas9 complex sometimes bonds to and cuts the target DNA at unintended locations.   Particularly when dealing with human cells, they found that sometimes as many as five nucleotides were mismatched between the guide and the target DNA.

(340)  Of the eighty-six embryos they started with, the Chinese researchers found the CRISPR/Cas9 made the correct edits in only four of them.  All four were found to have off-target events, suggesting that the treatment would not have worked if they had been trying to edit viable human embryos.