QUERY Incomplete understanding warning

[<richard.dudley@attglobal.net]

Posted by <Richard.Dudley@attglobal.net>

The following article may be of interest. It points out the problem of
limited understanding of interlinked issues (in this case global warming)
and the difficulty of getting across more subtle ideas as to how things
really work. I think it is a warning to modelers to be careful to gain a
complete understanding of the domains that one is modeling.


""In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm,"" from the New York Times,
January 1, 2008, By JOHN TIERNEY

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/science/01tier.html


Excerpt: ""When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the
availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of
it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of
dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic
deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a
stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.""

Richard
Posted by <Richard.Dudley@attglobal.net>
posting date Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:37:09 +0700
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