Memes

did someone in power get a note saying "this is likely to happen and here's how to prevent it", and it get burried.

That's just how reality works.

If you followed up and dealt with every low probability event (and most events of interest are low probability and most every low probability event would get a note about it in a large, properly functional government), first, it would be impossible, and second, you'd end up doing more harm then good.

Here's a good explanation.

It shows up best in the medical field because who doesn't want to catch a disease earlier? Right? And, no matter who pays for it, there is money in extra medical treatment (despite the harm that unnecessary medical treatment causes, and the fact that if you underscreen, you also cause problems, and those are more likely to embarrass you).

The jist is when you screen (like a mammogram or some political quant writing a note about their thoughts), there is some probability that the information is wrong.

A false positive is when you find that event/question/prediction/whatever A is true, but it is not in fact.

Then there's false negative, when you find that A is false, but it is not. (Additionally, true positive and true negative)

When you screen for "rare" events (which includes a lot of things that we might not think of as rare, or rare enough, like breast cancer or potential criminals), a vast majority of the people that screen positive will be false positive. The lower probability the event, the higher the false positive rate. It doesn't really matter much to the math what the false negative rate is.

This is extremely counter intuitive to people, even when you've been shown the extremely simple math, it takes a while to internalize.

This is just a trivial example of Baye's rule.

It's also why you'll never be able to treat mass shootings as a mental health issue or predict crimes unless you're willing to put a lot of innocent people in jail.