Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, January 8, 2003
RANDOM CHANCE OF GULLIBILITY
OTHER than astrology, which is never ever wrong, the art of prediction is a risky business marred by human error, guesswork and, well, unpredictability. Economists cannot forecast boom and bust cycles; the intelligence agencies cannot say when a terrorist attack will occur; defence chiefs cannot see where the next war is coming from; and criminal ``profilers'' point to the wrong suspects. In the case of the recent Washington sniper attacks, the profilers' preferred culprit was an angry, young, white man, working alone, who did not live locally, who might be married with kids and have a part-time job. Wrong on all counts. The pair taken into custody was black, did not match the profiles in any respect, and were not associated with al-Qaeda either. As the The Washington Post asked, did the profilers focus attention too intently on supposed suspects who did not come close to the real thing? Was the search for the culprits unnecessarily distracted? Did the suspects evade capture for so long because everyone was looking for someone else? The profilers achieved nothing. Their hit-and-miss conjectures possibly made things a lot worse. These people are not shams, charlatans and shysters, not necessarily. But they are not seers and prophets, either. Leave that to the Weather Bureau. A year ago, I heard the Bureau say quite clearly that we were entering another El Nino cycle in which rain was unlikely this year. Yes, a drought. True, this was the same Bureau that had such a woeful track record at predicting cool changes last summer, but were I a farmer hearing about El Nino, I would have set this year aside for fencing, not planting crops. By no means am I playing down the seriousness of the drought. Driving through western NSW a while back, the distressing evidence was clear enough in the form of dead sheep along the fence lines. Even so, being forewarned surely meant you could prepare for the worst? On the Yorke and Eyre peninsulas, the grain growers have had a tremendous run of good years - what was it, three, four or five record seasons on the trot, each year better than the preceding one? A rich harvest, and a lot of them did very well indeed while it lasted. It was not going to last forever, though, was it? This is Australia after all. And the cycle will turn again and again - global warming permitting. Speaking of which, are the predictions of the global warming doomsayers and their computer modelling to be believed? I remain unpersuaded but we no doubt shall know in 100 years. Meantime, we seem to have a touching faith in the ability of so-called experts to provide revealing insights into everything from our love life to our investments, and then to keep forgiving them when they can guess no better than the random toss of a coin. My random advice in all things is to expect the unexpected. Happy New Year.
