The Logistical Lesson of the Norwegian Massacre

While the last post hinted at political discussions about why the Norwegian massacre, it’s worth spending some time on the how. Whenever an event of this nature this happens people really really want to draw some Important Lessons from this. And I do too — but they might just differ from most other lessons.

One thing that was bound to surface was the idea that They should have Known because of the Signs the Killer left. Although it doesn’t specifically make the argument, here’s a relevant Telegraph article:

Anders Behring Breivik came to the attention of Norway’s intelligence services in March after he bought a large quantity of chemicals from a Polish company, it has emerged.
However, they failed to discover his bomb plot and appear to have done nothing to check why he wanted the chemicals or to have monitored him in the months before he launched his murderous rampage.
[...]
Janne Kristiansen head of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), said that Breivik’ came to police’s attention because of a purchase from a Polish business selling chemicals, but the incident was judged too insignificant to warrant a follow-up.
The PST receives “a lot of intelligence� on “a lot of people,� she said.
“We don’t have the right to put people’s names on the register just like that but we checked if we had anything on these people, if any of them could be connected to any other intelligence we had but we had absolutely nothing on Behring Breivik.� [Source]

The idea that something should have happened before the fact is not well supported. Hindsight really does cramp our view of the facts before the shooting, on which here’s LessWrong:

Hindsight bias matters in legal cases, where a judge or jury must determine whether a defendant was legally negligent in failing to foresee a hazard (Sanchiro 2003). In an experiment based on an actual legal case, Kamin and Rachlinski (1995) asked two groups to estimate the probability of flood damage caused by blockage of a city-owned drawbridge. The control group was told only the background information known to the city when it decided not to hire a bridge watcher. The experimental group was given this information, plus the fact that a flood had actually occurred. Instructions stated the city was negligent if the foreseeable probability of flooding was greater than 10%. 76% of the control group concluded the flood was so unlikely that no precautions were necessary; 57% of the experimental group concluded the flood was so likely that failure to take precautions was legally negligent. A third experimental group was told the outcome andalso explicitly instructed to avoid hindsight bias, which made no difference: 56% concluded the city was legally negligent.

Viewing history through the lens of hindsight, we vastly underestimate the cost of effective safety precautions. In 1986, the Challenger exploded for reasons traced to an O-ring losing flexibility at low temperature. There were warning signs of a problem with the O-rings. But preventing the Challenger disaster would have required, not attending to the problem with the O-rings, but attending to every warning sign which seemed as severe as the O-ring problem, without benefit of hindsight. [Source, emphasis mine]

So I don’t think there’s actually much to be learned about the events leading up to the start of the rampage. Now, it may be the case that the PST’s policy of not following up warning signs of this severity is misguided. This is where other intelligence services might help out with some expertise at the international level. But it doesn’t seem so — and neither does the idea of following up every scary rant made online by some wingnut that carries with it some vague hints of violence.

Many people have pointed out how much Breivik’s views have in common with some standard right wing anti-immigration or nationalist or white supremacist or anti feminist literature. If anything, that just shows how unjustified the idea that he “should” have been stopped is. The sad fact is that his rants are probably indistinguishable from thousands of other rants — even if you count rants with the same level of implied violence or more. But it can be difficult to face up to the fact that some tragedies are simply unpreventable. The Just World Theory (the psychological effect of believing in a just world at the implicit level even for horrible circumstances) won’t let us.

It is only when we look at the events after the fact (ie. when Breivik started the rampage) that I think there’s concrete room for improvement. So I certainly support a review of Norway’s police rescue tactics to improve the logistics, have better training for getting the team on site quicker and so on. For this, they may have to overcome what was described in the last post’s comment by Takis as the Scandinavian Achilles’ Heel: Scandinavia shuts down almost completely for summer vacations and a lot of personal info is available online. To this I’d add that the “not in Scandinavia” mentality almost certainly contributed to the police rescue procedures being a little less hardass than they should have been.

Either way, this lesson that I think should be learned is orders of magnitude smaller than the Great Lessons^TM that many are apparently learning from the tragedy.