The Boy Who Cried Nuke
Following up on a previous post, one of the things I find both irritating and misleading is when people attach numbers to artificially enhance the perceived certainty of an outcome.
The best example of this is the doomsday clock.
Basically it’s a Clock that is trending towards midnight — with “midnight” being a metaphor for actual nuclear war.
Political pundits, news anchors, and the ever amorphous “experts” love to use measurements like these in order to convince us regular folks that we need to change our ways before it’s too late — but in reality it’s just a way for them to look smug while being pessimistic. In reality, this clock has no basis in absolutely anything.
The best way to illustrate this is by turning the clock into a statistical percentage.
Each day has 86,400 seconds in it. So midnight would represent 86,400÷86,400, and the beginning of the day would represent 1÷86,400. Every other time signature would be some value in between.
Let’s look at two time signatures in particular.
The first is the doomsday clock in 1991, when it was the furthest away from midnight — 17 minutes away, or 1020 seconds away. With some simple division (85,380÷86,400), this gives us a 98.82% chance of a nuclear war.
Now let’s look at the current doomsday clock, currently at 100 seconds away. Again, using the same formula (86,300÷86,400) we get a probability of 99.88%.
This is a hilariously thin margin — basically, the people who created this clock are saying that they can predict the probability of nuclear of war within several fraction of a percent. Literally nobody can be this precise in their forecasting, especially when it concerns literally global Geopolitics.
Further, they have been predicting at least a 98.8% probability of nuclear war ever since 1947. This means they’re saying there should have been at least 70 years of nuclear bombings by now. While I don’t really go outside that much, but I’m pretty sure the actual number is much less than that.
Further still, I would like to point out that the doomsday clock has not changed for the years 2020, 2021, or 2022 — which is absurd. During this timeframe we have had:
A global pandemic, destabilizing basically every Geopolitical system, from biological to social to economic
A potential destabilizing event in the most powerful nuclear country (01/06).
The second most powerful nuclear country engaging in actual kinetic warfare.
If these events are collectively not enough to change the likelihood of nuclear warfare, then I simply have to question what methods they're using to determine the likelihood in the first place.
“No, but you don’t understand, the clock is not supposed to measure the probability of nuclear war happening for any given year — it is a more general measure that nuclear war will happen at some point in the future.”
Well, then what’s the point of the clock?
Let’s say I’m a weatherman, and I broadcast that there will be a 98% chance a heavy downpour of rain will take place. The next day comes, and no downpour. The day after that, no downpour. The day after, no downpour. And yet, each day I make the same forecast: there is a 98% downpour is coming.
If people come back to criticize me for my inability to forecast, I don’t have the right to shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, I didn’t say that the downpour will happen soon. I only said it would happen at some point in the future.” Objectively, I would simply be a bad weatherman.
“Fine, it’s not a perfect measure — but it’s still strikes at the truth of things. Anybody with eyes can see that, regardless of the actual percentage, we are far too close to a potential nuclear event.”
Then just say that.
Don’t pretend you’re backing it up with concrete numbers and statistics and clocks. By using this clock, you’re giving an artificial guarantee of an outcome that’s based on absolutely nothing — and when year after year goes by where the outcome does not take place, people completely disregard the message altogether.
Ironically, it will produce the exact opposite outcome of what you want; much like the boy who cried wolf, people will simply not be prepared when the unthinkable actually happens.