How to Save the World from Future Disasters Being Ignored Today | Richard Clarke | Big Think

How to Save the World from Future Disasters Being Ignored Today

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Before Bernie Madoff got caught, before Hurricane Katrina and Fukushima devastated cities, and before ISIS formed, there was an expert for each one of those events warning people in power that it would happen. What did those powerful people do? Absolutely nothing. These experts are called 'Cassandras' in hindsight, because as global security expert Richard A. Clarke explains in a previous Big Think video: "Cassandra in Greek mythology was a woman cursed by the gods. The curse was that she could accurately see the future. It doesn’t sound so bad until you realize the second part of the curse, which was no one would ever believe her. And because she could see the future and no one was paying attention to her, she went mad." So how can we graduate from sheepishly identifying Cassandras in hindsight, to recognizing and acting on their real predictions before the impending chaos hits? It's tough because everyone and their uncle is trying to get in on the prediction game. Who can you trust? Fortunately, Clarke and his research partner R.P. Eddy have used case studies to build a detailed template of the four aspects that determine whether we can avoid a Cassandra event: the quality and personal traits of the Cassandra themselves, the reaction of the audience or decision makers in power, the nature of the predicted event (is it too ridiculous to believe?), and the critics of the Cassandra. Even today, there are potential Cassandras predicting events that could be catastrophic to humanity this century. Can we learn from our mistakes in time? Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy's new book is

Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.

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RICHARD A. CLARKE:

Richard Clarke is CEO of Good Harbor Security Risk Management which advises companies and governments on cybersecurity.

He served for thirty years in the United States Government, including an unprecedented ten continuous years as a White House officiat serving three consecutive Presidents. In the White House he was Special Assistant to the President for Global Affairs, Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace, and National Coordinator for Security and Counter-terrorism.

Since leaving government in 2003, Mr. Clarke has served as an on-air consultant for ABC News for ten years, taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government for five years, and written seven books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the national number one best seller Against All Enemies and Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. His newest Novel, Pinnacle Event, was released in 2015.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Richard Clarke: So we talk about a failed warning as a Cassandra event. And we try to ask ourselves in the book, why did this Cassandra event happen? We find that there are four overall factors. There is the quality of the Cassandra herself or himself. Then there’s the issue itself and the qualities about the issue that make a warning relevant to it hard for people to accept. And then the last is the critics. The critics of the person giving the warning. The critics of the Cassandra. What did they say and what did they not say? And in those four column headings—the Cassandra, the decision maker, the issue itself, and the critics—under each of them there are several different criteria. By applying that template to a potential Cassandra event, we think we can begin to tell who’s right and who’s Chicken Little.

When we look at the Cassandra herself or himself, that’s probably the most important determinant of whether or not we have a Cassandra event coming. The most important determinant in what we call the Cassandra coefficient is that human being. Because what we’re trying to do here is predict the future not by some algorithm or artificial intelligence program; we think the solution here to predicting the future is finding people, people who can do it. So what are the qualities of a Cassandra? They’re an expert. They’re an expert in their field and they are internationally recognized as such. This is not someone waking up in the middle of the night with a premonition. This is not someone who every year predicts some other disaster. The Cassandras typically have never predicted a disaster before. They’re experts, they’ve never predicted a disaster before, and they are data driven. Usually they run the program that collects the data that convinces them. And when th...

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