With the winter of 2014-2015 failing to deliver much of a
snowpack to California, Californians entered a fourth year of drought. The
measurement on March 3rd of the snowpack was the water equivalent of
five inches, or 19% of the average for that date.[1]
The drought’s extension ran counter to the conventional wisdom that droughts
last three years in California. Such “wisdom” is problematic not only for its
specific content in this case, but also because of the underlying presumption
of epistemological infallibility. Ok, I’ll unpack this bit of creative
verbosity. Without being aware of it, we tend to assume that we can’t be wrong
about things we have not studied. In fact, we even dismiss the knowledge of
those who are learned in a given subject in favor of our own belief that we
can’t be wrong about what we suppose we know. This tendency of the human brain
gets our species in a lot of trouble, yet we as a species are nearly blind to underlying
drought.
The full essay is at “California’s
Elongated Drought.”
[1]
Adam Nagourney, “Alarm Rises For a State Withered By Drought,” The New York Times, March 18, 2015.