Little Data, Lots of Fear, and “An Abundance of Caution”

Tuesday, November 25, 2025

Post covid, few phrases should be more chilling than “an abundance of caution.”  Based on that phrase, when data on the actual danger of covid was quite scarce, we shuttered the world.  The cost remains immeasurable to this day.  Much has been poured into examining the educational costs, and they are extreme.  The economic loss can probably only be (poorly) estimated.  We know there have been rises in deaths from disease that might have been preventable had healthcare permitted screening and routine examinations.  We will be paying for our covid related “abundance of caution” for a very, very long time.  And yet that phrase continues to haunt us.

A recent photo essay out of India is quite compelling, but completely devoid of hard data.  It concerns the illness and deformity that haunts India’s uranium mining region and contends that uranium mining accounts for that illness and deformity.  But there is no data – only fear, presumption and correlations.  For example, uranium ore is not radioactive to any appreciable extent.  Yet, the term “radiation” appears ten times in the article, but never once is there a measure of it.  So, in the end, while the photos are haunting and compelling there is nothing, not a shred of data, that says the uranium mining is the problem.  It is simply presumed that because it goes on nearby it is an issue.

Thankfully, no one discusses “an abundance of caution” in this situation – at least not yet.  But they sure are setting the table for that phrase to do its mischief.

Climate scientists – well, a few of them anyway – want serious consideration of “geoengineering.”  For the uninitiated out there, that is the science of controlling the weather or the planet as a whole, and as any reader of science fiction will tell you, the stuff of nightmares.  Why would we consider such a thing?  There is simply no way we can gather enough data to be sure that we were doing good things rather than bad and experimentation is simply too risky due to the scale involved.

There are two possible reasons.  One – hubris.  Thinking we are smarter than we are. Two – “an abundance of caution,” because we fear climate change.  (In reality this is useless scientists pursuing grant money to do pointless science, but that is a story for another time.)  The seminal comic “Watchmen” is the tale of a superhero thinking himself so much better than everyone else that he creates a situation specifically to scare everyone so they will put him in charge – out of what appears to be “an abundance of caution.”  (FYI, the movie version is better than the box office indicated, but falls well short of the richness of the graphic novel.)

Why has this phrase taken such root in our consciousness?  I think there are two reasons.  One. a (well-earned) lack of faith in our institutions.  We don’t know who to trust anymore so we proceed with caution.  Two, a lack of gratitude.  We no longer look at difficult situations with optimism, but with pessimism.  Gratitude is a prerequisite for optimism and ingratitude is a sure sign of pessimism.  If I am grateful for what I do have, I can be optimistic that more will come.  Absent such gratitude, the world looks dark, dingy and hopeless – leaving nothing but fear and “an abundance of caution.”

Thanksgiving is just a couple of days away.  My wife and I were discussing Thanksgiving 2020 the other day – it was a time of great fear and small to non-existent gatherings.  It was a time where out of “an abundance of caution,” most people were not thankful at all and those that were, were thankful merely for not getting covid.  We are so much better than that.

Thanksgiving is about abundance, and regardless of circumstance, we have much abundance in this nation.  Heavens, the average homeless person has more wealth in their shopping cart than people can imagine in other parts of the world.  We need to be grateful, this nation is based on it.  Gratitude builds optimism, and optimism produces great results.  Let’s make this Thanksgiving the one where “an abundance of caution” leaves our vocabulary.