Richard Dawkins has the notion of memes. They are, crudely speaking, thoughts or ideas or ways of thinking or cultural traits, that spread through society. The idea occurs in his well-known book The Selfish Gene, published 45 years ago this year. I am interested in – and often frustrated by – the ways that ideas, particularly about safety or the lack of it, are spread or not spread. Maybe I should call it the Epidemiology of Intellectual Memes and apply for a grant.

One is the issue about ensuring continual cooling in the damaged Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, as I noted in a previous blog post. I cite, again, Charles Perrow from
his 2007 book, The Next Catastrophe, p134:

a hurricane…could take out the power, and the storm could easily render the emergency generators inoperative as well

and p173:

..no storms or floods have as yet disabled a plant’s external power supply and its backup power generators

He is pointing out the specific vulnerability and the mechanism, four years before it happened. I don’t think that can be too strongly emphasised. (Recall also more local occurrences of concern, also referenced in earlier blog posts: tsunami expert Yukinobu Okamura’s experience at NISA in 2009 and The New York Times’s interviews with tsunami experts )

So what is going on here? Why are these memes not getting through? Why and how are they blocked?

I think it is important to understand how, in greater depth, because the success of measures to improve safety depend on the success of measures to improve thinking about safety, and if we don’t understand how accurate thinking about safety (such as Perrow’s and Okamura’s) is blocked, sometimes passively (Perrow, I take it) and sometimes actively (TEPCO’s reported response to Okamura) then we will not be able to judge whether the measures will translate into appropriate action.

Allow me a couple more safety-related but nuclear-power-unrelated examples of weird meme behavior. I shall come back to the point at the end.

Martyn Thomas and I experienced this over the years with measures for SW safety as embodied in the functional safety standard for electrical, electronic and programmable electronic systems. Certain ideas – and I mean here also some scientific results that have appeared in the literature and been widely cited – just don’t seem to get through. We are taking different approaches to the problem; the German national standardisation committee is also worried that SW is taken care of appropriately, and so I was invited to join and did, whereas Martyn is operating outside of the standardisation process, which he considers inappropriately ineffective.

I think we simply don’t understand the meme-transmission process around critical memes.

Here is another example. The British parliament is currently considering a bill which introduces specific punishment for cyclists who kill pedestrians while cycling. It made the BBC and is still on the home page of the BBC News WWW site at time of writing in this article.  Notice that the bill, if it becomes law, will have at most one application every few years. Notice also that there are many laws already on the books to deal with unlawful killing, by bicyclists and others, and as far as I know such events are pretty thoroughly prosecuted in the UK. All this effort, then, is being put into a bill whose associated law will almost never be applied, and which does not fill any ostensible gap in existing law. How does this get to be? How does it get to be supported by such a person as Stephen Glaister, Professor of Transport and Infrastructure at Imperial College London, by everybody’s tables one of the top twenty universities in the world?

The BBC quotes him as saying

Subjecting everyone who uses the public highway to the same laws might actually forge better relationships between us all and erode the idea held by many that those who travel by an alternative mode routinely make up rules of the road to suit themselves.

First, observe he is mostly concerned about a meme, not about supposed dangers posed by cyclists.

Second, everyone who lives in Britain is subject to the same laws; that is a tautology. He may mean that they are differentially enforced, and he would be right. But the solution to differential enforcement is – obviously, I should have thought – a change in enforcement policy, not a new law (which may or may not be enforced, fairly or differentially).

The BBC goes on to observe that “some bike-users reject the idea that anecdote and mutual suspicion should drive policy.” This bike-user/driver/bus-user certainly does.

Back to the point. I advocated in an earlier blog post that there should be a public, maintained safety case for every piece of critical infrastructure. Martyn has been advocating something similar for years. Nancy Leveson suggested a hazard analysis rather than a full safety case (I read this as: leave off the risk analysis). I take it this would be something similar to Lee Clarke’s Possibilistic Analysis (confirmed in private discussion), so it looks prima facie as though there might be some interdisplinary agreement on such a measure. But Nancy (op. cit.) and others privately have also pointed out it might not be workable because industry would object to the potential publication of their intellectual property, since details infringing intellectual property rights are included in most safety cases (although I do know of exceptions, such as The Pre-Implementation Safety Case for RVSM in European Airspace, which Eurocontrol put on the WWW and I claimed was flawed).

I think they are right that there would be industrial opposition and why. But it is not inconceivable that methods might be found to secure the intellectual property while at the same time reaping the benefits of public discussion of the safety/hazard case.

However, the benefits I was anticipating are based on the assumption that once something is public, it gets transmitted widely and there becomes pressure to act. That would only be true if the resulting memes are not blocked. Charles Perrow’s book is public: meme blocked. Okamura’s observation reached the place to which it was addressed: meme blocked. So a public safety case will not by itself necessarily bring benefit; one needs concomitant measures to ensure that resulting memes are not blocked, and I don’t know what those should be.