Knocking on Heaven's Door - Lisa Randall [97]
The time frame can also influence the computed cost or benefit for policy decisions as do the assumptions the deciding parties make, as we saw with the recent financial crisis. Time scales matter in other ways as well, since acting too hastily can increase risk while rapid transactions can enhance benefits (or profits). But even though fast trades can make pricing more efficient, lightning-fast transactions don’t necessarily benefit the overall economy. An investment banker explained to me how important it was to be able to sell shares at will, but even so he couldn’t explain why they needed to be able to sell them after owning them a few seconds or less—aside from the fact that he and his bank make more money. Such trades create more profits for bankers and their institutions in the short term, but they aggravate existing weaknesses in the financial sector in the long-term. Perhaps even with a short-term competitive disadvantage, a system that inspires more confidence could be more profitable in the long term and therefore prevail. Of course, the banker I mentioned made $2 billion for his institution in a single year, so his employers might not agree on the wisdom of my suggestion. But anyone who ultimately pays for this profit might.
THE ROLE OF EXPERTS
Many people take away the wrong lesson and conclude that the absence of reliable predictions implies an absence of risk. In fact, quite the opposite applies. Until we can definitively rule out particular assumptions or methods, the range of possible outcomes is within the realm of possibility. Despite the uncertainties—or perhaps because of them—with so many models predicting dangerous results, the probability of something very bad happening with climate or with the economy—or with offshore drilling—is not negligibly small. Perhaps one can argue that the chances are small within a definite time frame. However, in the long run, until we have better information, too many scenarios lead to calamitous results to ignore the dangers.
People interested only in the bottom line rally against regulation while those who are interested in safety and predictability argue for it. It is too easy to be tempted to come down on one side or the other, since figuring out where to draw the line is a daunting—if not an impossible—task. As with calculating risk, not knowing the deciding point doesn’t mean there is none or that we shouldn’t aim for the best approximation. Even without the insights necessary to make detailed predictions, structural problems should be addressed.
This brings us to the last important question: Who decides? What is the role of experts, and who gets to evaluate riskiness?
Given the money and bureaucracy and careful oversight involved in the LHC, we can expect that risks were adequately analyzed. Furthermore, at its energies, we aren’t even really in a new regime where the basic underpinnings of particle physics should fail. Physicists are confident the LHC is safe, and we look forward to the results from particle collisions.
This isn’t to say that scientists don’t have a big responsibility. We always need to ensure that scientists are responsible and are attentive to risks. We’d like to be as certain with respect to all scientific enterprises as we were with the LHC. If you are creating matter or microbes or anything else that has not existed before (or drilling deeper or otherwise exploring new frontiers on the Earth for that matter), you need to be certain of not doing anything dramatically bad. The key is to do this rationally, without unfounded fearmongering that would impede progress and benefits. This is true not just for science but for