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0 pointsinopinatus4y ago0 comments

The moral of “chicken little” isn’t what you think it is. The key message is that bad authorities fail at listening and create perverse incentives towards misinformation, shirking their accountabilities with disastrous consequences.

People telling it to children are trying to silence their kids. They’re not focused on improving transparency, or on systemic outcomes, they just want to regulate individuals. So they are in fact the selfsame bad authorities.

The target of blame in the story is not the chicken.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

kbenson4y ago· 2 in thread

Eh, pretty sure there's more than one moral there. No reason to ignore the "don't run off half-cocked spreading information you haven't confirmed or may not mean what you think" just because there's another lesson in there also.

inopinatusOP4y ago

This is the lie told by the failed managers of the community in which the chicken lived, hoping to shift the blame for their own poor attention to contingency planning onto a chicken.

If you have an early warning device with a high false positive rate, you don’t avoid catastrophe by ignoring the warning.

randomswede4y ago

No, you don't ignore the warning to avoid a catastrophe, you ignore the warning to avoid alert fatigue, burnout and other bad effects.

If your only early warning device has a sufficiently high false positive rate, scrap it, or find another early warning device with a sufficiently different set of false positives and then require both of them to alert, before you pay attention.

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