Susan Hough: 'Confusing Patterns With Coincidences'

I've been quoting a lot recently, as I do not have enough web time for blogging. But for this one, I do have something to say.

The quote goes first:

The game goes like this: you look back at past recordings of X, where X is radon or whatever, and find that X had shown anomalies before large earthquakes. But the problem is that X is typically what we call a “noisy signal” — data that includes a lot of fluctuations, often for varied and not entirely understood reasons — so finding correlations looking backward is about as meaningful as finding animals in the clouds.

We do know that some earthquakes, including the L’Aquila event, have foreshocks, but we can’t sound alarm bells every time little earthquakes happen because the overwhelming majority — 95 percent or so — will not indicate a coming major quake.

And the full article is available here.

Does the story sounds remotely similar to the one happened in China last year? Or indeed to the current economic crisis centered around the Wall Street melt-down? The choice is ours to make: find a way to neutralize these high-stake risks, or live on like we do now and let issuance of one kind or another to clear up the aftermath. The strange thing is that we have so far opted unanimously for the latter option, which seems to be cheap in comparison. But is it? Clearing up the mess in L'Aquila might be cheap (no derogative use here), but for the other 2 cases, the consequences are all too severe.

I seriously suspect that the whole world nowadays is risk-loving, for my problem is your problem, but my profit is too often my profit alone--the negative externality problem is everywhere. In theory people would look to the government for solution, but governments are more concerned about social unrest than about the possible loss of lives... What other options have we got?