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Duncan O'Leary

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Duncan works on projects looking at public services, skills and work.

Posted by Duncan O'Leary at 5:06pm on Tuesday, 19th October 2004

Interesting to see George Bush criticising his opponent for his ‘September 10 attitude’ yesterday (by which he means ‘only committing to a response after America is hit’). It reminded me of Paul’s post a while ago which discussed the role of Black Swans and our instinctive responses to them.

Comments

1
There's a difference. Hindsight bias leads to overly specific response to unusual events in anticipation of a repeat. The more rational response is heightened awareness of risk and making efforts to spread risk and minimize the consequences of failure. The Sept. 10 attitude is to ignore the event, pretend that nothing has happened and so learn nothing. The Sept. 12 attitude is to expect the unexpected rather more seriously and take whatever steps can be taken to remove foolish risk while seeking to imagine the unimaginable. The unexpected will still happen, perfect safety is not possible, but the heightened awareness will both reduce the incidence of occurences and improve the response. There's nothing we can do if a nearby star explodes and bathes the earth in hard radiation, but we might be able to fend off a smallish asteroid. A Sept. 12 attitude would be to anticipate possible problems arriving from space, thinking through responses, and making some preparations to repel some threats and mitigate the consequences of others. Kerry is not a complete fool, he's a politician, and would make efforts to adopt a Sept. 12 attitude within the limits allowed by his supporters. His criticisms are empty from a policy perspective, just gutter politics, and his policies, if elected, will demonstrate that. That the subject has been elevated to prominence is revealing. No leader will feel politically safe while failing to demonstrate a Sept. 12 attitude. They would be sitting ducks for the opposition.
Posted by Jo Ma  at 2:05pm on Saturday, 23rd October 2004
2
Point taken - but i think what i was suggesting that the 'September 10th attitude', as expressed by Bush ('only committing to a response after America is hit'), implies that America knew exactly where the danger was coming from before Sept. 11th but simply waited to be hit first because it was playing by the rules. This seemed a lot like the post-hoc rationalisation of Black Swans, and likely to spawn a new approach to intervention abroad without neccessarily bringing about a new mentality that expects the unexpected as you suggest.
Posted by Duncan O'Leary  at 10:39am on Tuesday, 26th October 2004

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