rlamacraft @rlamacraft@qoto.org

@GrahamDowns
I got long-winded, as is my wont. Feel free to ignore this reply, as I'm not really arguing with any of your points as much as I'm clarifying my own thinking.

The thing about the story though is that, even if it is a story about a boy who, maliciously and strictly for his own amusement, raised a number of false alarms, we tell the story to teach children not to raise alarms. There's no corresponding story which teaches nuance or the value of early detection or whatever. The only story we have, the one we consider so important that it's entered our lexicon, is about the dangers of raising a false alarm. Yes, to cry wolf has a nuanced meaning, but the phrase is most often weaponized to shut down people who are raising inconvenient alarms by accusing them of willful malice.

Then there's the fact that the number of instances of people actually crying wolf in the manner of the story is vanishingly small. But it's the same thing we hear (and to be clear, I'm not accusing you of saying this at all) when women accuse powerful men of sexual misconduct, for example. "But what if they're lying?" Well, that would be a concern if it ever happened, if crying wolf in that way benefitted the woman doing it at all.

Cui bono, as it were, in the story of the boy who cried wolf? Sure, the teller of the story would have us believe that the boy derived great pleasure from his trick, but come on. What did crying wolf get him? As a parable telling children to take their guard duties more seriously, perhaps it would work, but that story is "the boy who wasn't paying attention and didn't cry wolf and then the wolf ate the sheep he was supposed to be watching and maybe him too." There's no reason to make the parable about false alarms unless you're trying to teach your children not to raise alarms for kicks, which just doesn't happen often enough to be worth making a cautionary tale about unless you believe that pretty much any alarm a child might raise is spurious.

And as you say, there's very little way to tell the difference between crying wolf and a legitimate warning of something which winds up for whatever reason not happening. So by teaching children not to raise false alarms, you teach them not to raise any alarm until it's too late to matter.

It should perhaps not be lost on us that children, as with women, were and still are the lower members of the social hierarchy. Is the boy who cried wolf about a wolf, or is it about discouraging children from telling people what adults have done to them? Who can say? I just think it's a really creepy lesson to teach children, and we do so at our own peril.

As for false alarms, I agree that they do exist and children are sometimes responsible for them as in the case of calling in bomb threats to get out of going to school. The thing is though, the solution isn't to teach kids never to call in bomb threats. It's to provide a nuanced education in when it's appropriate to raise an alarm. And we're largely incapable of doing that because we view children as incapable of nuance, as selfish in intent, and because we ourselves were taught the same boy who cried wolf nonsense. If the burden of proof for genuine false alarm is made high enough, people will never raise the alarm at all because the risk will be too high. And that only serves wolves.

I'll close with my own little parable: I have a burglar alarm because my house has been broken into and robbed multiple times. My burglar alarm has never prevented this. Indeed, the only time my house was ever broken into while I had the burglar alarm, I turned it off myself.

Why? Well, the municipality in which I live charges homeowners money if their burglar alarm goes off accidentally, the police are called, and there is no indication of forced entry. Their argument is that police time is valuable and by making the police respond to a burglary which isn't actually happening, one is wasting taxpayer resources.

What this means practically is that any time my burglar alarm goes off, I have to weigh the probability of it being a false alarm in my head before I decide whether to simply ignore the alarm, or at least ignore it as much as I can while I try to get home to see if my house has really been broken into. False alarms are pretty common with these systems. Too much wind, a loud stereo system, a large truck, or someone innocently knocking on the door can set them off. My cats can set them off from the inside. So the vast majority of the time, if my alarm goes off, I will "ignore" it so as not to risk being charged for a false alarm.

Practically speaking, the response times for the police in my area are so poor that having them show up half an hour after the burglar has already left is pointless except to certify that the house was indeed burgled, something which I can call the police to do once I've verified it for myself. No need to worry about false alarms. I might as well just "ignore" every alarm and then call the police once I get home and can be sure the alarm wasn't false.

Why do I have the alarm then? Well, it turns out that I mostly pay ADT for the privilege of advertising their company by putting signs up saying my property is protected by them. Those signs are more protection than the alarm system. Criminals go for low-hanging fruit, and having an alarm when your neighbor doesn't is like outrunning the bear: you just have to be slightly higher-hanging fruit than the lowest hanging fruit. It's not perfect because criminals are both stupid and illogical at times, but in that case, frequently a loud alarm going off, even if no police are ever going to arrive, is enough to scare the burglar off. It's all smoke and mirrors.

The moral of this story is that this arrangement benefits everyone except me. It benefits the city because they've made false alarms pay, and since the vast majority of alarm calls are false alarms, they can have terrible response times and do nothing while still getting paid. It benefits the alarm company because I get to pay them for a system which doesn't matter in its effectiveness as much as in its presence. They have no incentive to make their systems more accurate because the inaccuracy doesn't cost them any money at all. That technical debt is passed to the consumer wholesale. And it benefits the criminals who are smart enough, because they know that alarm systems are bogus. That's a fairly minor point because if all criminals figured that out, no one would bother having alarms anymore.

All this from the seemingly reasonable stipulation that false alarms are wasteful. But if anyone actually believed that, government would force alarm companies to shoulder the burden for their faulty systems. Consumers would force government to increase response times and actually provide useful policing instead of what amounts to insurance inspectors.

If, instead, we approached the situation with the axiom that it's better to have a million false alarms than one ignored alarm which is true, it would make a huge difference to the situation. And that is what the boy who cried wolf is all about. Not the boy in the story. The boy about whom the story was written. If you approach that story with the idea that maybe the village shouldn't be allowed to fob off vital responsibility to a child, how different does it look? If you say that the villagers have enough on the line that maybe they should accept the minimal risk of false alarm in exchange for greater security? If you believe that the wolf is an important enough threat that one might set a watch, then perhaps it's important enough to care about the quality of the watch? Perhaps it's important enough that you'd rather deal with the relatively minor annoyance of a false alarm than risk an alarm being needed and not given?

Ultimately it illustrates priorities. And while I agree that false alarms devalue alarms in general, that's largely because we don't value false alarms as a culture. If instead of viewing false alarms as illustrative of alarms' lack of value, what if we instead thought of every alarm as an illustration that the alarm system was working as intended? "There was smoke but no fire," becomes, "Our smoke detector worked really well. Fortunately further measures weren't needed this time, but we can feel safer knowing that we can detect signs of fire early enough that they don't become problems." Hypothetically, of course. That doesn't solve the problem of malicious false alarms, but what if we treated crying wolf as the cost of vigilance, rather than some other externality? Right now, the cost of discouraging alarms is that sometimes alarms should have happened but didn't, or were dismissed. Is that a higher price to pay than to respond to a few false alarms?

To put it another way, the criminal justice system has famously been said to prefer letting a hundred guilty people go free than to punish one innocent person unfairly. That's an ideal that the system doesn't live up to and I fear that more and more people are happy about that, but what if that ideal were a reality? Would we be better off? I think so, but I don't speak for anyone but myself.

I guess I didn't really close with a parable. I closed with a bunch of questions. Sorry for lying.

@Nfoonf
I once sat in on a talk given by firefighter and author Dr. Burton Clark EFO who had written "I Can't Save You, But I'll Die Trying" and then subsequently "I Can't Save You and, Don't Want to Die Trying," both of which are fascinating books I recommend to anyone who is interested in the topic of fire safety and firefighting in the US in general. One of the things he talked about was just this idea: that the only time we need heroes is when things have already gone about as wrong as they can possibly go. We don't view heroic firefighting and indeed death as the systemic failures they are. If firefighting were working, we'd never hear about it because the work would be thankless and invisible, not to mention essentially risk-free.

Sorry, had to plug those books.

Anyway, firefighting is an excellent example too because they would rather be called out to a thousand fires which turn out to have been nothing than not to be called out to one nothing that turned out to have been a fire. The risk-reward calculus is so much more complicated than a simple "cost of false alarm versus cost of property burned" because the longer you leave a fire, the worse it becomes, whereas I guess with a wolf the wolf doesn't become more dangerous because you let it eat the boy before you did anything about it.

Anyway, thanks for thinking of this! It's a terrific illustration of various stuff involved in real-world situations. Much appreciated!