Bearcub, I love your Titanic analogy. Let's run with it. I haven't seen the most recent movie, but I'm familiar with the general story.
Let's say that there are 1000 people aboard and enough lifeboats for 200 of them. You're the captain. You're on the bridge and you see an iceberg looming in the distance. You give whatever commands are necessary to try to avoid the iceberg and the engineers move out smartly to execute them.
-You don't know if you will hit the iceberg or not.
-If you hit the iceberg, you don't know if the ship will glance off or whether the iceberg will damage the ship.
-If the ship is damaged, you don't know if it will sink or be able to limp along to port.
Now you have to decide what to tell the passengers.
So you call your officers together and ask for input.
-A couple of your officers say the ship is unsinkable.
-A couple more say that there's an inner hull, which will be enough to keep the ship from sinking although it may take on water and flood the lower levels and cause some ball gowns to be ruined or maybe even the lights to go out.
-A couple more tell you they don't know but give you some probabilities and recommendations.
-And one guy starts running around waving his arms wildly wailing that the end is near.
So Captain, you consider your options. You can tell the passengers:
-That the ship is sinking.
-That there could be a problem and they need to get their lifejackets and pay attention for further instructions.
-Nothing.
You could convey that message on the PA system or you could instruct your officers to spread the message informally. You could make it an order or a suggestion. You could even give different messages to different sets of passengers.
-If you tell them nothing and the ship sinks, 800 or more of them die.
-If you tell them nothing and the ship misses or glances off the iceberg, 1000 passengers have a great voyage.
-If you tell them the ship will sink and it misses or glances off the iceberg, well, now we've gotten to the crux of the matter. How many of them will die having had heart attacks from fear or trampled each other trying to get to the life boats. 50? 100? 300? 500? More? All those passengers dying for absolutely nothing. Even the ones that don't die would be scarred for life. As I read you, this is what you would choose to do--guarantee that those 50 or 500 passengers die regardless of whether or not the ship sinks on the chance that the ship might sink in which case you will have saved the 200 for whom there is space on the lifeboats. And you think I'm hardhearted!! What I hear you and others saying is the very sensible "better safe than sorry." This is a false dichotomy. There's no safety in warning the populace to prepare when it's not feasible for all of them to do so. There's a cost to be paid either way.
You wrote: "Would you rather have been one of the informed who were permitted to climb aboard a Titanic Lifeboad "
You've created another false dichotomy here. Just because someone is informed doesn't mean that he can get on a lifeboat. Remember, there are only 200 seats.
Further, in your analogy, you suggest that our Y2K passengers aren't being informed. They are, if they choose to listen and if they believe what they hear. They have access to the officer who's wailing about doom. They have access to the probabilities and recommendations of the officers who are making recommendations to the captain. Right or wrong, people are individually deciding what to believe and what to do. What they're not getting, and what you seem to want, is a warning of imminent danger from the captain. What you forget is that the captain's best information tells him that the ship probably won't sink and he's acting accordingly.
I know you were offended that in the movie, the captain chose to let people dance. He was presumptuous to make that decision for them. It would be equally presumptuous, however, to take your tack and overrule their judgment by saying the ship will sink when you don't know any such thing.
As I said earlier, I like your analogy. The one flaw it has is that we already know the Titanic sinks. But no one knows what Y2K will bring.
Karen |
