To close, one of the working theories regarding the anthrax attacks - almost certainly, I would hazard to guess, the lead theory once the spores were identified as originating at Fort Detrick - was that the perpetrator(s) carried out the attacks to raise awareness and attention to US vulnerability to bioterrorism, and (therefore) wished to catalyze political will, spur Congressional appropriations and put in motion strategies and the machinery for a massive, or massively revamped, biodefense effort. If the theory is correct, then the perpetrator accomplished much of what he set out to do. If this wasn’t a coup, I’m not sure what is. We’ll perhaps never know the truth about Dr. Ivins, but I think it’s a valid exercise to wonder whether he would have agreed with that.

As regards how widespread this is and has been, you might want to check out the history of Operations Research. As the writers of this blog know, operations research (OR) is the “discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions” (from http://www.scienceofbetter.org/). In the early 2000s, The Institute of Operations Research and Management Science, the professional society of OR researchers, had its 50th anniversary, and they released an online number on the history of OR. Below is a link to an article that traces the organizational backdrop of the OR professionals:

http://www.lionhrtpub.com/orms/orms-10-02/frhistory.html

It seems the field as a professional practice is initiated during World War II and then turned after that to industrial and civil time problems. The early meetings in the 1950s were attended by a couple of hundred people, almost all of them employed by industry, government or the military. Seems to have been a flourishing professional practice, and this social integration might have created what you term “a sense that they had a distinctive approach”.

Inside the article are also documented interesting disagreements on what constitutes the object of OR research (military or business), and thoughts on why the membership of these organizations has declined since the 1970s despite the development of the computers and the increased access to data. All very contemporary problems as well judging by someone who studies OR.

This makes me think, rather tangentially, of another question in all of this: how widespread or specific are these kinds of techniques. What kinds of experts engage in this sort of modeling? When I was working on disaster models, I was struck by the extent to which there seemed to be a pretty small universe of experts and organizations that comprised the modeling community. They were in various places — insurance companies, some doing contract work for the government, etc. — but they seemed to have a sense that they had a distinctive approach. I am not sure whether that is because there was a common contrast with a more dominant form of risk analysis in the insurance world, or whether it was really that this was an important locus for this kind of modeling more generally. But in any case, it would be good to know who exactly the “practitioners” are in these worlds — particularly as this moves into being another taken-for-granted approach to risk assessment (maybe it has already become so long ago).

One question: Is “step toward abstraction/separation of signifiers from signified” the right way to see this? It is interesting to think about this viz your observation about the 19th century move away from “polling” an entire population because weighting samples proved *more accurate*. I am reminded of an argument that Henry Brady made after the 2000 election debacle, when he said that good exit polls might actually be more accurate than the actual ballot returns because the error rate was so high in the counting, and with the registering of votes (due to hanging chads, butterfly ballots, and all those other things we learned about in November/December 2000). So isn’t this a case in which sampling procedures or even simulations actually bring us *closer* to the signified, if we still want to speak in such metaphysical terms?

1) My housemate is a super-quant ph-d student in political science. As I had in the past pushed him to tell me how he feels about simulation techniques as opposed to tradition statistical analysis methods, his response consistently has been that they are not fundementally different. For him, and I suspect in general, simulation seems to be a more convinient way to come up with data; and in this respect from a practical point of view it is not fundementally different from traditional statistical analysis. I thought the difference may be comparable to another shift that took place in 19th century (i think) in terms of data collection. As Hacking notes, at some point statisticians realized that partial data collection, i.e. sampling, was more efficient and had less error than collection of data from the entirity of a population (i.e. the sample size is as large as the population size). Can we see simulation as an other step towards further abstraction/seperation of signifiers from the signified?

2) One might dispute the significance of simulation in cases such as baseball games. Even in the case of electoral voting, it seems quite essoteric (though I am sure it has profound consequences in terms of the results of elections). However, if we go back to the issue of simulating the economy, it seems like Goldman Sachs is doing this in a routine basis for taking positions in the market place. They simulting the US and the World Economy to generate worst case economic crissis scenarios. I suspect this is used on a wide scale for pricing of assests in general.

As an aside: In the last two days the price of oil has dropped for a couple reasons, among them that the first major storm of this hurricane season apparently is not going to hit the Gulf of Mexico. Oil futures move wildly in relation to anticipated hits on the gulf, since this takes out a supply that is vital to US energy. So as you say, there is at one level nothing particularly novel about the link between weather and energy vulnerability.

By the way, this idea about “unthinkability” is something that is worth revisiting. Of course everything is thinkable, and the really big ones all were anticipated in one way or another (as we all know, both a hurricane like Katrina and the use of planes to hit the WTC had been thought through). This is just to say that, as you suggest, the category of catastrophic/unthinkable/disastrous/low-probability highconsequence needs some rethinking, and probably some internal differentiation.

I think this is a useful starting point to think about what constitutes a catastrophe. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not interested in doing a language exercise or engaging in a sociology of framing - although framing has maybe received less attention than it might in our collective work. In any event, amongst first-order observers and practitioners I think there has occurred a kind of conflation between WMD events (i.e., ostensible future events), terrorism, and catastrophic scenarios. It seems that it’s all become one big mush. The result, one might argue, has been misguided DHS grant funding policies, in which everything that was once “unthinkable” (IEDs, bioterrorism, nuclear/dirty bomb detonation through terrorism) has received the lion’s share of attention and, for awhile, resources.

There *is* a disconnect somewhere. There is a local-federal divide over how risk is understood and mitigated. I recently attended a SUASI meeting where it was announced that an RFP would go out soon for care and shelter projects in which applicants would have to incorporate a nuclear detonation scenario into their applications in order to receive funding consideration. Imagine the consternation as a bunch of Bay Area emergency services officials, most of whom are focused principally on one thing: earthquakes (now over 95% probability of > 7.0 Mw on Hayward/San Andreas faults within 30 yrs. according USGS), are scrambling to put together some kind of “coherent” grant application that focuses mostly on earthquakes (probability known, with high confidence) with a sprinkle of nuclear detonation (probability unknown) in the mix. The kind of creative thinking that Stephen mentioned above - e.g., articulating an all-crimes strategy within law enforcement - will be hard-pressed as we are seeing, once again, that the all-hazards approach is facing its limits. Should catastrophic WMD events be understood and mitigated the same as other events (”natural” or otherwise) according to the logic of an all-hazards approach? Is the one type of catastrophic event similar to the other? Empirical evidence may be swinging towards a “no,” and that, it seems to me, should have policy and practice implications.

I just mention it because I have a strong suspicion that there is a large gulf between the legitimizing force of a label like “Cybernetics” (both for china in the 1970s and for Greenhalgh in anthropology today) and the actual practices of population control as they played out. Another interesting comparison here is Fred Turner’s book From Counter-culture to Cyberculture which also makes the claim of a transfer of cybernetics–in this case from Norbert Weiner to the planning department of Royal Dutch Shell around the 1973 oil crisis via Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth catalog. But it’s eminently clear that it wasn’t any actual set of practices that was transferred so much as a kind of systems-ecology-scenario-seeing mantra that fit in with Brand’s worldview. Whatever cybernetics is doing in that case (and maybe in the population case) it isn’t at the level of practices but at the level of justifications and ideological argument…