Six scientists were just sentenced to six years in prison for giving bad predictions and, as it turned out, incorrect predictions based on the available scientific data. The scientists were no slouches (a seventh convict was a directing government employee:
A trial—which lasted from September 2011 until October 2012—found six scientists and a former government official guilty of involuntary manslaughter. According to the prosecution, they had spread “inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory” statements after preliminary tremors could be felt on the days before 6 April 2009. The seven members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks who were convicted were: Franco Barberi, head of Serious Risks Commission; Enzo Boschi, former president of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology; Giulio Lorenzo Selvaggi, director of National Earthquake Centre; Gian Michele Calvi, director of European Centre for Earthquake Engineering; Claudio Eva, physicist; Mauro Dolce, director of the Civil Protection Agency’s earthquake risk office; Bernardo De Bernardinis, former vice-president of Civil Protection Agency’s technical department.[7]
I mean, holy camoli. The Wiki cite ends so:
Many international scientists were displeased with the verdicts.[7] The journal Nature ran an editorial stating that the “verdict is perverse and the sentence ludicrous.”[91] Malcolm Sperrin, a British scientist, said:
If the scientific community is to be penalised for making predictions that turn out to be incorrect, or for not accurately predicting an event that subsequently occurs, then scientific endeavour will be restricted to certainties only, and the benefits that are associated with findings, from medicine to physics, will be stalled.[7]
Has this been done since, I don’t know, didn’t one of the Caesars have the sea whipped because of a storm? It’s pretty spooky.
While in this particular case there may be grounds for debate, in principle the idea of holding “scientists” accountable for their work seems to me to be a very good idea.
As a registered professional engineer, I can be sued, lose my livelihood and go to jail for any mistakes I make. Why should a “scientist” be treated any differently?
You say this while living in a society predicated on our ability to predict massive numbers of things about what nature is going to do. The existence of everything from aircraft to medicines to pointy sticks is dependent on our ability to predict the natural world.
So I can’t predict what time high tide will be tomorrow? And I can’t predict whether it will be lighter at noon or at midnight? And I can’t predict whether the mean temperature will be colder in December or July? And I can’t predict whether I will see more hummingbirds in August or in January? And i can;t predict whether there will be more rain under an intense low pressure or an intense high pressure?
Absolute nonsense. Man can predict what “mother nature” is going to do with ease.
So if it’s that cut and dried I guess it shouldn’t be a problem prosecuting scientists when they predict something about nature incorrectly since it could only be a result of gross negligence on their part right?
Well, of course, there was Galileo, but he did not get in trouble for failing to predict something correctly (unless it was failing to predict the shifts in Vatican internal politics that he got caught up in). I am not sure if any of the anti-Lysenkoist biologists in Stalin’s Soviet Union were jailed or otherwise formally punished. I would not be surprised if some were, but again, it is not quite the same sort of thing.
British meteorologists who failed to predict the severity of the “Great Storm of 1987” came in for a lot of public criticism, but I don’t think anyone was subjected to criminal punishment.
If you’re going to take the law of the excluded middle, at least apply it in a formal system where it makes sense.
We can predict many things quite well. We can predict many things somewhat poorly. We can predict other things not at all. Earthquakes fall in the last two categories. If we prosecute scientists for being wrong, they will remain there. How is that at all difficult to grasp?
To truly understand what’s gong on here, we’d need to know exactly what the scientists said, I’d think. I’ve never seen any scientific reports that earthquakes can be predicted. However, it appears they were talking about aftershocks. If the scientists said, “There is absolutely nothing to worry about 100% guaranteed.” then I guess they might be liable for something – perhaps even criminally liable. But I’d think it would have to be something that other equally knowledgeable scientists would say were definitely incorrect statements that lead directly to the deaths.
It isn’t difficult to grasp at all, and I agree. How does what you just said equal
“Absolute nonsense. Man can predict what “mother nature” is going to do with ease.”?
There are many billions of ‘things about nature’ we might try to predict - some or many of them follow a predictable pattern we can easily predict. And the one in a million time that nature doesn’t follow that pattern we can say “well you can’t predict mother nature”. Something that only happens every 100 million years might be due tomorrow and we just don’t know there is a pattern.
The thread is about a case where nature wasn’t predicted accurately so I was just being a little facetious about an argument that we can do so with ease.
No, that’s just Bill O’Reilly. He cannot predict what mother nature is going to do, no way no how. Tide goes in, tide goes out, Bill O’Reilly can’t explain that.
This case reminds me a little of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, when 6 people died in a near-hurricane level storm that came up suddenly. In the pre-race briefing, the Bureau of Meterology said that conditions were still unclear and they could not give any predictions. Once they realised the storm was brewing, at about the same time as the race was starting, they put out a general warning, but did not specifically contact the race organisers. Also, their wind speed and wave height predictions were given as averages, not maximums. Some less experienced racers therefore underestimated the predicted severity of the conditions.
The Bureau was criticised by the coroner, and several changes were made to the way weather predictions are given. But nobody was arrested or charged.
And Weedy has identified the essence of the Italian case, with a very clear example of this should have been handled.
The prosecution was not about whether the seismologists should have predicted the L’Aquila earthquake - the prosecutor explicitly stated this. The issue was how the risks of the preceding earthquake swarm was communicated to the public, which (in the public perception) downplayed the risks and communicated a false level of confidence (in particular, the given impression that the ongoing swarm would relieve faultline stresses and reduce the likelyhood of a major event). The issue was complicated by the predictions of an amateur seismologist who had made claims to the papers - this raised the issue in the public mind and necessitated the public statements by an official who did not have a clear understanding of the science.
Now, I do not believe that the scientists should have been prosecuted for manslaughter - as in the Hobart story, the investigation should result in a clearer and more transparent process for communicating the risks of unpredictable events - raising safety and protecting those who supply professional opinions.
But the case was never about scientists not being able to predict an earthquake.
There are differences, and it makes it altogether hard. Another example occurred in the last few hours. There was an earthquake off the coast of Canada, and a tsunami warning was issued for Hawaii. Some of the wording is good. The mayor of Honolulu Peter Carlisle:
This is even more immediate than serious weather warnings.
And this also underlies a significant issue with the Italian earthquake. There was no useful time line for any warning. The amateur that claimed to predict the earthquake could not provide any useful timing information. Indeed there is real doubt that he actually predicted the earthquake at all. There was no warning “get out of your houses, there will be an earthquake today”. His warning was a month earlier, with no date, just that it was coming. So what are the populace supposed to do? Leave their houses and jobs, and go and camp in safety in the fields for a month? It isn’t tenable. If you were in charge of preserving life and property you would probably consider that this was a very serious risk. 65,000 people were made homeless in the quake, and L’Aquila has a population of 73,000 Managing this level of dislocation is an extraordianry undertaking. Imagine doing this simply on the say so of an amateur geologist’s hunch? Or being the director of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, you are going to order 73,000 people out of their homes for a month or two? It won’t stop the quake. There is a very good chance you will end up with quite a few people dead because they are living rough. Indeed L’Aquila was still quite cold when the quake occurred, and overnight temperatures hovered around freezing. There is really no chance you will not lose people.
The underlying problem is that there is no useful warning possible, unless it is possible to nail the time of a quake down to within a day or two. The major culprits in the death and destruction are decades of complacency and institutionalised corruption that saw a region that historically experiences many earthquakes build buildings totally incapable of surviving an earthquake.
The consequences of the prosecution and conviction of these scientists will be interesting to watch. It does strike at the social responsibility of scientists, and with luck there may be some useful outcomes. I suspect that the people convicted may well have been guilty of the sort of public arrogance that often seems to come with the job. This often makes them easy targets for public anger, and in this case retribution.
Larry Wasserman has a nice writeup with a translated transcript of one of the phone calls. It looks like the government put some pressure on the scientists to downplay the risks of the quake and then threw them under the bus when it turned out to be worse than was expected. Needless to say, this is bad.