You Won’t Believe What This Book Said About Cassandra
The book is about the people who raised alarms about tragedies and why they were ignored. The events covered in this book are the First Gulf War; the Katrina Hurricane; the UBB Mining Explosion; the Fukushima Disaster; the Rise of ISIS; Bernie Madoff’s Scam; and the 2008 Financial Crisis
These incidents seem to be chosen deliberately. There’s a development of a theme — each incident starts from a different place and ultimately shows why something gets ignored. In the end, the book gives us a framework to spot potential Cassandras.
How does it help with forecasting?
This book doesn’t directly help you forecast unlikely events; you can’t be a Cassandra. The book says the people qualified in a particular field can be a Cassandra and only in that field. So, by definition, forecasters who often make predictions across various fields are excluded. So how does the book actually help?
It helps you spot people who can make predictions about unlikely events. Unlikely events, by their very nature, receive less focus. That’s why Cassandra could be a lonely voice even among experts. Adding to this, there are other factors which dilute their impact.
So, whenever you have to make a prediction about an unlikely event, you can find these Cassandras, properly adjust your forecasts, and gain an edge. But it isn’t that straightforward either.
Cassandras differ from forecasters in a few ways. Except for the people in the intelligence and embassies, most aren’t expected to make forecasts on regular basis. So, they have no records of accuracy. Sometimes they don’t predict at all, they investigate and point out a bad person/institution, who is not caught until it’s too late. In that sense, they’re closer to journalists. But you still need journalists. Want to know why?
A good chunk of people raised concerns privately. So, their opinions aren’t immediately accessible. It may take some legwork to find out those ones. This means, for the public to find good Cassandras, they must find good journalists first.
Miscellaneous points:
A. It’s Less Finding, More Filtering: This is a nitpick. Nobody is finding anything. It’s not like animal tracking. We aren’t studying Cassandra’s behaviours in their natural habitat to know where we are most likely to find them. Cassandras themselves approach the relevant people; the book helps them filter out to keep the good ones. I was a little disappointed with that because I read this book hoping to track Cassandras in India. Because there have been some disasters that were reasonably forecasted.
(There was a devastating flood in 2018 in Kerala that was warned about in an ecological report seven years before. In another instance, there was a horrifying oxygen shortage during the second covid wave where hospitals resorted to begging for oxygen on national television, lest all the patients die. The situation was dire in many states except in one town where the mayor had the foresight to install oxygen plants locally.)
B. Cassandras Could Take Screenwriting Workshops: Cassandras would do well if they wrote movies. Their predictions are already dramatic. They give us a good movie and help their cause at the same time. Apparently, Deep Impact got enough attention to the issue of comets that certain monitoring programs got fast-tracked. It isn’t the complete solution, but still, one should get whatever help they can.
This is a dark thought. Scientifically accurate disaster movies do well twice — once before the disaster, and once after.
C. The Pitch For ‘Cassandra Shark Tank’: The book asks to give platforms to people who say things we may not be ready to hear. Let’s make this a reality show. This will kill two birds with one stone —
1. Force the authorities to listen to Cassandras.
2. Compel Cassandras to frame warnings in a way that is accessible to the common people.
Participants with the strongest issues can go to the White House. The only difference is if we don’t choose correctly, the ones to get eliminated are us.