no doubt that the overrated journalist Constanza Santa Maria, in her obvious professional obsession, passed one of the titles that more would help ease their paroxysmal style of journalism. A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper of John Allen Paulos is not in your library and probably never crossed his eyes. A pity, because it would have done much. She and we anxiously viewers of his chronicles in which the words risk, danger, care, threat, alarm and distress campaigns like a blanket claim that stalks the unwary public. Because in one chapter, the mathematical denounced this as fruitful as unholy alliance between journalists and lawyers, especially those representing people who say they suffered losses because of defective products or services-to which the pupil of the school newspaper of the PUC seems to have adhered while.
Allen begins by recognizing that, surely, most of these complaints are justified, but puts his moral criticism that naive that Santa Maria and all the disciples of journalism of fear bathe his notes that all the dangers we are exposed could be avoided if only those responsible to think a little more, if the "authorities" and monitoring more citizens were more alert:
- No one can deny the terrible anguish of the families and friends, but I'd like to see even if only once, some serious journalistic work saying "All this is very tragic, but what would modify policy to reduce the chances of such tragedies without increasing the chances of others? " (...) The pain of the victims and the compassion that arises all too often used to justify the absurd requirement that should never have risks. "
- The uncertainty in science, and current state sometimes unavoidable, but judges, lawyers and jurors often behave as if to respond definitively to all the witnesses were sufficient to reflect the experts have time to do their calculations and the lifting of the lids.
- In one experiment, for example, told a group of subjects that a man had parked a car on a slope and that the vehicle had slid only to a fire hydrant. Another group was told that the vehicle had run over a pedestrian. The first group thought, in general, who had been an accident, the second group considered responsible for the driver. Important consequences that have to be the result of significant neglect is a superstition lovely.
Regarding the latter, I wish I read this all the generals after the battle that appeared after the inauguration of Transantiago. All those who shout themselves hoarse pointing the finger at the "authorities" for not having foreseen all the circumstances a radical change in urban life entails. All those who are offended by the supposedly stupid decisions that caused the problems raised without ever wonder what would have happened if the decision had been the opposite (would they be able to assure me that there had not been the same problems or other?).
