Extremes and Experience: Lessons from Japan

SOURCE: AP Photo/Yomiuri Shimbun A boat sits atop a building in Otsuchi, Iwate Prefecture, Japan, Tuesday, March 22, 2011, following the March 11 earthquake and tsunami which devastated a vast area of northeastern Pacific coast of Japan.

Like most children of the Enlightenment, I believe in the lessons of experience. I am an empiricist who has spent much of his life teaching and writing about the importance of science, observation, experimentation, and the accumulation of data.

But here’s the problem: Extremely rare events by definition provide precious few data points. There are no “norms” in incidents that take place hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years apart. More problematic still are events that have never taken place but, due to drastically altered conditions, would be largely sui generis—if they ever occur at all. And then there is the fact that individual human lives are brief, and even homo sapiens probably have only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years. Our individual memories are short, and so are our collective memories, and so is the experience that our evolution has not fully factored into our psychology.

Sleep-deprived pundits working overtime on the unfolding crisis in Japan have been circling around but not landing on the underlying philosophical problem: How does one predicate a science or public policy on what statisticians in search of data points would call a very small N?

Now add to this problem the fact that some of these extremely rare events have huge and devastating implications. Over the last few days, we have been told over and over again that the combination of a 9.0-magnitude earthquake, a tsunami, and a set of three nuclear meltdowns or near meltdowns is unprecedented. Tell that to the 1,000 human beings who might have been left on the planet after the Toba volcano 70,000 years ago, or the survivors of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, or the Chernobyl survivors in 1986, or the Bhopal disaster victims, or the residents of New Orleans, or the Haitians, or the Japanese.

To earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, chemical plant disasters, hurricanes, and nuclear meltdowns, some would add to this dispiriting list the risks of asteroid impacts, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and computer takeovers, not to mention the cumulative physical, environmental, political, and sociological effects of climate change. Catastrophic events of low probability and high magnitude can be of natural or human sources or the product of some combination of the two. The physicist Martin Rees and the philosopher Nick Bostrom are among those who have seriously entertained the hypothesis that the parade of perils for which human beings are partly responsible could profoundly disrupt or even virtually eliminate human life over the next century or two.

The main problem here is one of values: How should a society allocate resources to prepare for these low-probability, high-magnitude events? Should we build higher, stronger seawalls or develop rockets with devices that can cause a meteor to swerve a few inches while it is still far enough away from the Earth?

But there is some hopeful news for us empiricists: Disasters are hard to prepare for but not impossible to predict. There are warning signs but we have to look for them. Technology has given us all sorts of canaries that can be strategically placed in coal mines. But even as the Japanese disasters were unfolding, some really dumb legislative proposals were being advanced, laced with transparent politics such as cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tsunami-sensor program.

If human beings really are smart enough to survive, we don’t need extremists, but leaders who can help us prepare for extreme events.

Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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