Nature abhors a vaccuum, or why so many of us got so worked up over so little

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I wish everybody could get into Rick Cowles' forum and read cl's post titled "Response to Lane Core's TB2000 Post - Apology." I hesitate to paste it over here, as he seemed to want it there, but the gist of it is how corporate/legal paranoia kept a lot of good news under wraps in the utility industry, leaving only mealy-mouthed non-statements for the consumption of any outsiders who were paying enough attention to bother reading them. I certainly can't prove it, but I suspect the same phenomenon was happening on a much larger scale, feeding the fears of many of us. What we were hearing from government and industry across the board was almost worse than nothing at all. It didn't pass the smell test.

In short, there was a vaccuum of verifiable information, and into that vaccuum rushed a lot of people with incomplete or no expertise (In the case of Y2K, that would describe everyone on the planet). Some were charlatans, but many were bright, well-intentioned people, struggling to fill in the blanks on issues they didn't fully understand, because they saw too much at stake to do nothing. Many of those people hung out at this forum, and people like "Master Programmer" have no business coming in here with guns blazing at the sysops and other decent regulars.

Speaking of the sysops, a word on "censorship." I said this once before, but it got lost in a flame war: I don't agree with every twitch of the sysops. But think of this as talk radio on the Web. There's a host with a set of personal biases and a finger on the disconnect button. You may get treated unfairly or hear someone else get the bum's rush, and that may make you angry. But it's not your show and you don't own the radio station. You can roll with it and keep listening/calling, or you can spin the dial somewhere else. Your choice. But unless you're a sociopath, you wouldn't jam the station's frequency or unleash some kind of autodialer to tie up all the phone lines. Why is this so hard for some people to understand?

I'm not ready to sound the all-clear myself, although the worst scenarios look increasingly unlikely. I always thought the biggest threat was economic, and I still think so. But "nobody knows," that tired phrase, still holds true in my mind.

For the gloating pollies, I'm ecstatic that their guess appears to be right so far in many respects. But they shouldn't flatter themselves that it was anything more than a lucky guess. I do hope that they and the rest of us continue to get lucky.

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000

Answers

For the gloating pollies, I'm ecstatic that their guess appears to be right so far in many respects. But they shouldn't flatter themselves that it was anything more than a lucky guess.

Does this mean that the doomers simply "guessed" wrong?

-- (duh@duh.duh), January 07, 2000.


Hear here, Thinman :-) Nice to see you again.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), January 07, 2000.

Anyone that has any sense of reality would not have to guess. What the heck happened to our society before computers? What, now we cant live without them or something? I bet you all really freak out when the power goes out - which by the way, happened last year, the year before, etc. etc.

Ooops, my light bulb just burned out. Guess you all are vindicated. Shoot. I guess I look like a real jackass. Guessed wrong I suppose.

-- Gary Clark (garyc@mdc.com), January 07, 2000.


duh,

Well, yes. Doomers, pollies, middle-grounders (that would include me)--we all were guessing. That's the nature of trying to predict the outcome of an unprecedented event.

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.


Well, yes. Doomers, pollies, middle-grounders (that would include me)--we all were guessing. That's the nature of trying to predict the outcome of an unprecedented event.

Well, if we were all guessing, what was the purpose of posting all the information in this forum? I mean, if this was all pretty much based on luck, wouldn't that make all the analysis that has been done here pretty much irrelevant?

-- (duh@duh.duh), January 07, 2000.



I'll tell ALL of you what:

There AIN'T no guessing about how this Viagra is working...Just ask my darling Liddy. She can barely speak she so worked out.

-- Bob Dole (bdole@stiff.com), January 07, 2000.


If I'm going to make a guess, I'd prefer that it be an educated one. Trouble was, you could get a lot of equally credible but contradictory "education" on Y2K. I just don't think anybody should think they were right on this because they had a bigger brain. This issue turned out to be too big for anyone's brain. If you don't believe that, just look at all the "pollies" who were even surprised at how smoothly things went.

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.

If I'm going to make a guess, I'd prefer that it be an educated one. Trouble was, you could get a lot of equally credible but contradictory "education" on Y2K.

I guess my point was that it was based more on "luck." The key, of course, is to be able to sift out the contradictory "education" and come to a conclusion. Not an easy task for anyone.

I just don't think anybody should think they were right on this because they had a bigger brain. This issue turned out to be too big for anyone's brain. If you don't believe that, just look at all the "pollies" who were even surprised at how smoothly things went.

This may indeed be true. Both sides looked at the evidence presented and came away with different conclusions. One interesting point to note, is that if you go back into the archives, you will find several messages supposedly analyzing the differences between those who "GI" with those who do not "GI". You will find that the main thrust of each of those messages is that those who "GI" do, in fact, have a "special insight" (or perhaps, "bigger brain") than those who do not. They were supposedly "unique," in that they could see the "bigger picture" of how everything fits together.

I believe you will find that much of the "gloating" from pollies that you witness is based mostly on the posts which clearly depicted the "GI's" as having "bigger brains" than the "DGI's" because they "understood." As we can see, they clearly did not understand as much as they thought. I don't think the "gloating" comes from the Pollies thinking that they were smarter than anyone else, but that the "GI's" weren't quite as smart as they thought.

-- (duh@duh.duh), January 07, 2000.


Points well taken. Even though your handle looks like a flame in itself, thanks for a civilized discussion. Doomers, pollies, see how that works?

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.

Duh,

Regardless of someone's conclusion, if he/she approached it through reason, logic, objectivity, research, looked for validations, audited info, expert testimony, etc. etc., with the conclusion logically following his/her findings -- in other words, used their heads rather than just feelings or complete trust in a single or a few "spokespersons", etc. -- that's the right approach.

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 07, 2000.



Shoot, I thought I "GI" cause I am a pessimist by nature. Maybe a touch of creative paranoia, to boot?

Seriously, if someone looks at the same facts as I do, or even at facts or reasoned opinion and comes to a different view than me, so be it. At least they examined the issues.

My biggest gripe is with those who form opinions based on little if any evidence, on their "feeling", or whatever.

-- mushroom (mushroom_bs_too_long@yahoo.com), January 07, 2000.


Thinman:

Simplistic. I grant that our information was pretty lousy, for many reasons. I grant that making a ballpark estimate required a fairly large ballpark. But not *that* large.

Hey, I spent over a year and over 3000 posts battling against the consistent, clear and directed misinterpretation of that evidence on this forum. For my efforts, I was repeatedly assured that I just didn't get it, and that I was incapable of seeing the big picture.

Now you're going to tell me that I was lucky, and those who "get it" just happened to suffer from some kind of random bad luck? Bullshit! Just because we don't know what will come up when we roll a pair of dice doesn't mean that 10,000 is JUST as good a guess as 7.

No, I didn't know exactly what to expect. I *did* know that hopelessly one-sided interpretation of a hopelessly one-sided selection of evidence was a stone guarantee of missing the target by a mile. The widely and frequently expressed desire to drive away anyone who didn chant church dogma was icing on this cake. If you were to TRY to draw up the best blueprint for failure you could, it would be hard to do better than just watch the techniques used by so many forum pessimists.

I have no idea why some people were so eager to embrace the notion of calamity, but I do know that they didn't do it just out of "bad luck". And they didn't attack rather than listen to those who pointed out what they were doing out of bad luck either. Closed minds don't miss the ballpark by three states because Dame Fortune just happened to frown on them. It required careful and systematic effort.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 07, 2000.


Perhaps luck was an ill-chosen word, because it suggests randomness when in fact the machines were ultimately going to act as their programming dictated. But impossible as it was to put all the pieces together before the fact, it might as well have been random. I always viewed the polly-doomer flame wars here as being a little like arguing violently over who picked the right lotto numbers--before the drawing!

For the record, I always kind of identified with you, Flint, because I sensed that your view of this thing wobbled all over the place. That's not a criticism in my view, but shows a willingness to keep processing new evidence. I, too, vacillated wildly in my own mind. I'm glad in the end I didn't go overboard on physical preps, but again, I just feel lucky, not smart.

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.


Thinman:

Hey, I was fighting to *understand* what it all meant. My overall expectations ended up being (at least so far) a bit pessimistic, but not that far off base. The pessimists were trying as hard as they could *not* to understand, by being resolutely unreceptive to any information or analysis that didn't fit their preconceptions. This is NOT "luck", sorry. This is dumb.

I think the answers you're looking for are to be found in psychology, NOT chance.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), January 07, 2000.


Flint and Thinman,

In many situations, including this one, a person can certainly objectively process new evidence and not vacillate very much. But it does not follow that the subject would therefore be unreceptive to evidence that would have led to a more drastic change in viewpoint.

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 07, 2000.



Cool thread going here though, guys!

-- eve (123@4567.com), January 07, 2000.

I probably should have said this earlier, but yeah, there were some people who obviously had their hearts set on calamity. But I don't think you can say that of everyone who took a pessimistic view. Again, lacking independently verifiable information, people sought to fill the void, and you didn't have to look very hard to find credible and scary stuff. If the people who should know the truth act like they're hiding it--and many of them did--it's easy to assume the worst.

-- Thinman (thinman38@hotmail.com), January 07, 2000.

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