Inevitable Quake Rumors Arise in China

The Times of London reports that China's bloggers are sharing rumors and conspiracy theories in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake. Because earthquakes are such unsettling and mysterious events, widespread irrational thinking is common everywhere they happen. I've heard Californians make the same claims in connection with earthquakes — animals did strange things; scientists predicted a quake but the authorities suppressed them; the government won't accept evidence that contradicts its dogma, and so on.

Let me say first that no one predicts earthquakes today in government or academia. China tried for a while starting in the 1960s. Offices opened all over the country to collect stories of unusual animal behavior, natural phenomena and seismic signals. In 1975 an earthquake warning issued to the city of Haicheng was actually followed by an earthquake, and many lives were saved. That is the only significant time the system has worked, and today the general scientific opinion is that it was coincidence. The Chinese model may be flawed by its cultural/political origin at the height of Maoism, the apotheosis of the proletariat. Large networks of amateur observers were relatively easy to establish, and the prediction algorithm relied on folk traditions. But human sensory observations are notoriously unreliable, and the folk traditions do not hold up against actual data.

The eruption of rumor in the Chinese blogs surely matches what everyone on the street is saying, the same things people everywhere have always said. The history of amateur observation probably adds nuance to the Chinese response. But it's a good inoculation to read the Chinese expressions of panicked thinking now, in hopes that we will be less susceptible when our turn comes in our own lands.

It is literally human nature to turn events into stories imbued with meaning. People who claim to have open minds are often the fastest to shut them down, grasping at an explanation and clinging to it against all evidence. One of the hardest things a scientist can do is resist human nature and remain open to new explanations, but that's what they train for.