Silly Little Country

Hindsight Bias

I expressed some disgust about this yesterday, but now Damian Penny points very sensibly to what I think are some very smart comments from Megan McArdle, avoiding the easy second-guessing that seems to be increasing in the media. Her words

The overwhelming majority of murders that take place on campus (or anywhere else) are not a prelude to a mass killing. Should we really act as if they were, because it might prevent the 0.001% that are? Shutting down campus is not free; if nothing else, it absorbs a huge number of police resources that could otherwise be used to track down the killer in the vast majority of cases where the killer is still at loose, armed, dangerous, and not planning to kill himself. In this particular case, shutting down campus would have been the right answer. But in 99.999% of cases, it would have been the wrong answer, and would have placed the public at greater risk, as well as producing mass hysteria on campus. Castigating the administrators for getting it wrong, or rushing to enact legislation that ensures administrators do the wrong thing in most cases, is bad decision-making. Not that this will prevent us from doing just that.

False positives are a real problem, but not for reporters looking only backwards.

posted by Alan Adamson @ 7:15 AM