Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Massimo Pilducci.

And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, today we're going to kick off our discussion by talking about a rather shocking legal decision in Italy a few weeks ago.

I think I heard the place.

Yeah. Ring a bell as well?

So, you know, feel free to jump in and correct my pronunciation here, as I'm sure you do.

So in 2009, there was a pretty severe earthquake in a city in Italy called Laquilla.

Several hundred people, there were several hundred casualties.

And just recently, six Italian scientists and a former government official were sentenced to six years in prison each for failing to appropriately warn the public

about the severity of the coming earthquake.

So this decision, this legal decision has sent shockwaves through much of the world,

but especially the scientific community because of the implications that failure to predict, you know, very uncertain natural disasters can hold, can be held against a scientist legally.

Right.

And so it sparked a lot of debate about to what extent it's reasonable to expect scientists to be able to predict uncertain things like earthquakes

and what the legal ramifications should be.

So we're going to talk about this case, but then expand the discussion into a broader discussion

of what scientist's responsibility is or should be to the public when it comes to risky uncertain scenarios.

Right.

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