The Revised Aesop, #2:
Once there was an alarm system that was prone to giving false positives. Grown-ups disabled the alarm, then when disaster struck, blamed the faulty alarm rather than their own irresponsible action.
Moral: most people are terrible at assessing repetitive risk, which is why alarm design is a professional field. When designing an alarm, imagine what happens if it fails, and then try to design failsafes around that.
Corollary: humans are never more ingenious than when they’re working on breaking systems.
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
see also the chapter “Crying Wolf” and “Our Little Secret” in my forthcoming monograph How To Maintain a Kiddie-Fiddler Panic: Psychological Games, Social Disincentives and Public Policy in the US and UK, 1970-2016
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It’s a complex problem, not best addressed by decentralized networks of people with no formal responsibility.
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Richard G is that a real monograph, or is that something from Tartary?
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Alec Henry part of that was more that public alarmists weren’t good at understanding causation versus correlation.
The studies only really showed (last I checked, its been some time) that living in areas where you are likely to have a gun in your home makes your more likely to have suffered harm. Potentially owning a gun is dangerous, also potentially similar to how places where most people have tornado insurance are more likely to suffer a tornado.
That Aesop fable moral is “Everyone forgets or remembers the difference between causation and correlation only when it suits their existing beliefs,” with a corollary “More education on a topic only makes people more entrenched in their views”
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Zzarchov Kowolski perhaps education isn’t the right word for that. Although “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s, few” ….maybe because the expert has better heuristics for the probable outcomes of risky strategies.
Put another way, “any story can have a happy ending if you end it in the right place.”
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Luka Rejec I’m very happy to tell you that’s not actually what I’m working on. It just struck me as a nicely complex case for “crying wolf” studies.
Stuart Robertson I have a sense you’re alluding to some specific players. As a general proposition, though, conflicts of interest are pre-supposed to be bad because, as my economist friends like to say, they create bad incentives and yield bad results, right? I’m trying to think of a case where you could possibly say they aren’t bad.
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Richard G Education is where you listen to the words of others and treat it as equivalent personal experience. Its vastly more efficient than personal experience but not without the risk of information transfer errors.
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As a fan of wolves, I’d like to point out that the grown-ups also refused to blame their not bothering to build a proper fence.
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Richard G: Are you really writing such a book?
I’m rather curious about this field, because of my interest in moral panics in general and Rick Falkvinge’s warnings in particular.
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Andres Soolo I think it’s a fascinating subject and in particular I think we need more studies around child molestation exactly because it’s such a pariah category these days… but no, I’m not even in the right field to write such a study.
Zzarchov Kowolski my goals for education are a bit more optimistic – I hope to “draw out” my students, try to engage their curiosity and help them develop tools to frame and answer questions themselves. Merely transferring knowledge I regard as more like training. I don’t know if I’m effective at it or not.
Still, I’m a big fan of the old saying real world experience is the best school, but its fees are exceptionally high.
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Richard G: That’s unfortunate. I would have liked to read a scientific treatise of these issues.
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If I were just setting out in social science research now I’d be tempted to study pedophiles and psychopaths as the two groups of people least likely to get a fair hearing.
I also think it would be extremely useful to compare the lives and experiences of Muslims and Islamophobes in the US and Europe, to see what kind of practical difference they make to each others’ daily lives.
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Have you read The Guilt Project or Statement of Facts by Vanessa Place?
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I have not. Yet.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/mobile/p/moral-panics-goode/1101193916/2672744604912?st=PLA&sid=BNB_DRS_Marketplace+Shopping+Textbooks_00000000&2sid=Google_&sourceId=PLGoP20456&k_clickid=3×20456
looks highly relevant. Also on the reading list: Europe’s Inner Demons by the great Norman Cohn
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe's_Inner_Demons
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