Edge: WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?

WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES MAKE DISASTROUS DECISIONS?: JARED DIAMOND (p3)

The first item on my road map is that groups may do disastrous things because they didn't anticipate a problem before it arrived. There may be several reasons for failure to anticipate a problem. One is that they may have had no prior experience of such problems, and so may not have been sensitized to the possibility. For example, consider forest fires in the U.S. West. My wife, my children and I spend parts of our summers in Montana, and each year when we fly into Montana I look out our plane window as our plane is coming in to see how many forest fires I see out there today. Forest fires are a major problem not only in Montana, but throughout the U.S. Intermontane West in general. Forest fires on that giant scale are unknown in the eastern United States and in Europe. When settlers from the eastern United States and Europe arrived in Montana and a forest fire arose, their reaction was, of course, that you should try to put out the fire. The motto of the U.S. Forest Service for nearly a century was: our goal is that every forest fire will be put out by 10:00 AM of the next morning after the day on which it has been reported. That attitude of easterners and Europeans about forest fires was because they had had no previous experience of forest fires in a dry environment where there's a big buildup of fuel, where trees that fall down into the understory don't rot away as in wet Europe and as in the wet eastern United States, but accumulate there in a dry environment. lt turns out that frequent small fires burn off the fuel load, and if you suppress those frequent small fires, then when eventually a fire is lit it may burn out of control far beyond one's ability to suppress it, resulting in the big disastrous fires in the U.S. Intermontane West. It turns out that the best way to deal with forest fires in the West is to let them burn, and burn out, and then there won't be a buildup of a fuel load resulting in a disaster. But these huge forest fires were something with which eastern Americans and Europeans had no prior experience. The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn. So here's an example of how a society with no prior experience of a problem may not even recognize the problem — the problem of fuel loads in the understory of a dry forest.

That's not the only reason, though, why a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it actually arises. Another reason is that they may have had prior experience but that prior experience has been forgotten. For example, a non literate society is not going to preserve oral memories of something that happened long in the past. The Classic Lowland Maya eventually succumbed to a drought around 800 A.D. There had been previous droughts in the Maya realm, but they could not draw on that prior experience, because although the Maya had some writing, it just preserved the conquests of kings and didn't record droughts. Maya droughts recur at intervals of 208 years, so the Maya in 800 A.D., when the big drought struck, did not and could not remember the drought of A.D. 592.

In modern literate societies, even though we do have writing, that does not necessarily mean that we can draw on our prior experience. We, too, tend to forget things, and so for example Americans recently behave as if they've forgotten about the 1973 Gulf oil crisis. For a year or two after the crisis they avoided gas-guzzling vehicles, then quickly they forgot that knowledge, despite their having writing. And again in the 1960s the city of Tucson, Arizona went through a severe drought, and the citizens swore that they would manage their water better after that, but within a decade or two Tucson was going back to its water-guzzling ways of building golf courses and watering one's gardens. So there we have a couple of reasons why a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it has arrived.

The remaining reason why a society may fail to anticipate a problem before it develops involves reasoning by false analogy. When we are in an unfamiliar situation, we fall back on reasoning by analogy with old familiar situations. That's a good way to proceed if the old and new situations are truly analogous, but reasoning by analogy can be dangerous if the old and new situations are only superficially similar.

An example of a society that suffered from disastrous consequences of reasoning by false analogy was the society of Norwegian Vikings who immigrated to Iceland beginning in the year AD 871. Their familiar homeland of Norway has heavy clay soils ground up by glaciers. Those soils are sufficiently heavy that, if the vegetation covering them is cut down, they are too heavy to be blown away. Unfortunately for the Viking colonists of Iceland, Icelandic soils are as light as talcum powder. They arose not through glacial grinding, but through winds carrying light ashes blown out in volcanic eruptions. The Vikings cleared the forests over those soils in order to create pasture for their animals. Unfortunately, the ash that was light enough for the wind to blow in was light enough for the wind to blow out again when the covering vegetation had been removed. Within a few generations of the Vikings' arriving in Iceland, half of Iceland's top soil had eroded into the ocean. Other examples of reasoning by false analogy abound.
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