The Dawson Shooting and the Retro-Obvious.

[swestrup]

I pointed to this article on biases in human thinking a few days ago. It has suddenly become more relevant. In the wake of the recent shooting at Dawson, many folks have been asking "Why didn't realize this would happen and prevent it?" The answer, of course, is that no one knew. Many folks looking at the evidence from the blog have assumed it would have been obvious. The person was a Goth, they played violent video games, they posed with guns, etc, etc. Of course, it turns out that NONE of these are relevant factors in predicting violent behavior. In fact it turns out (read the article above) that folks are always far more willing to ascribe predictive values to such 'clues' after the fact than before. It seems that, once one knows the outcome, one is very likely to ascribe a high probability to the outcome, even if the evidence is lacking. Even when folks know this to be the case, they still think that things were obvious in retrospect when they would have said that nothing was predictable in advance.

This is yet another thing, in addition to numeracy and literacy, which I wished they taught journalists today.

Comments

[sps.livejournal.com]

The thing I found interesting was the conversations I overheard: one espousing the idea that it wouldn't have happened if the guy's blog had been suppressed; the other opposing gun control because of the obvious irrelevance of ready access to firearms and the necessity to 'defend' ourselves against this kind of thing.

Um....

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

Suppressed? Then there would have been NO clues, rather than clues that were ignored.

And, while being goth is too wide a net, I would say that the level of obsession with guns and death that this guy showed should have been a tip-off.

[swestrup]

Of course you think so. Everyone thinks so, and they're wrong. Put it this way, do you currently know anyone who is obsessed with guns and/or death? I do, a number of them. Do I predict any of them are going to go ballistic and take out a school? Nope. Some of them are soldiers. Some are cops. Some are just harmless nuts.

The human psyche is not so easily predicted, and there really are tons of studies proving it.

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

But did any of them specifically post about their fantasies of walking into a school and killing everyone there?

...actually, I can't find a cite that he actually said that now. I remember reading it in a roundup of his blog comments last week, but only vaguely, so I must be making it up. Nevermind.