A Goddamn Mess

I'm sure you've all been reading about the growing oil disaster in the Gulf that has Katrina survivors reading Job. For the simplest explanation I've seen of what happened, see Al-Jazeera's explanation.
But I just read a piece in the Times about it, and I'd like to add a little analysis that comes by way of my Skepticism class.

The article asks the question, overblown fears and blames aside, how bad is this, actually? "As one expert put it, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game." In short, I'm worried because the baseball season is 162 games long.

The article ends with this quote: "“The gulf is tremendously resilient,” said Dr. Dokken, the marine biologist. “But we’ve always got to ask ourselves how long can we keep heaping these insults on the gulf and having it bounce back. As a scientist, I have to say I just don’t know.”" I wish science and philosophy would take that kind of ignorance more seriously. Contemporary philosophers have worked hard to step around the so-called "skeptical problematic," which a lot of you would probably say is a fine thing today, especially when you read some of the wacky ways in which that problem has been re-presented in the literature. A la The Matrix, are we actually brains in vats, whose world is being generated by stimuli from a giant computer? I'm not kidding: the Brain-in-a-vat example of skepticism is so common that it has been abbreviated to BIV.
But the problem is really not as silly as that. It's modern form was renewed (from the ancient Pyrrhonians and others) by Rene Descartes, who wondered simply how he could tell, at any given moment, that he was not dreaming. The movie Waking Life has given us the answer, right? Try to work the lights in your dream, etc. That's not the worry. The worry is that this world that we come back to after we wake up from other, less sensible dreams every morning, could itself be a dream, which wouldn't be a problem except that causality would not be assured. But, in fact, this illustrates a nice point, which is that causality is in fact not assured. The last time you let go of an object with weight in midair, what happened? It fell to the floor, right? How do you know it will do that again next time? If there is a .001% chance that some other event (a bird snatches it, let's say) might radically interrupt your predicted outcome, was it a sure bet last time you guessed? That's an extreme example, and one might argue that a bird snatching up a falling object does not prove gravity wrong (which is fine, but it still doesn't hit the floor). There is another example I will borrow from the literature. You are at a party. Someone says, Do you know if Soandso is going to be at this party? You call Soandso to ask, and he says he's on his way out the door, and you have no reason to suspect he's drunk or lying or anything like that. You tell Someone, Yes, I know Soandso will be here. But then Soandso is struck with a meteorite on his way over, and never arrives. Did you have knowledge when you said you did? You were predicting the future, and though no one in the neighborhood had ever been struck by a meteorite before, and meteorite strikes the world over are very rare, nevertheless Soandso was struck by a meteorite when you said he wouldn't be. Certain philosophers want to certify your claim to knowledge, absolving you of responsibility for chance because the probability of the alternative outcome was so slim. Certain other philosophers are more stringent in their certifications for knowledge, but they are derided professionally because, it is said, their position ends in skepticism, from which no progress can be made.
A final example. Someone determines that it will be profitable to drill for oil at the bottom of the sea, because even though there is a chance that the mile-long pipe carrying oil to the surface might rupture and failsafe mechanisms might not kick in, allowing oil to devastate both the undersea environment and the shoreline livelihoods of humans, there's really not much of a chance that that will happen. Then, lo and behold, it does happen. Was it knowledge that led to such risks, or just really good guessing?
Experts know until they don't.
Skepticism is a real problem, even to people who don't want to admit it into their philosophical systems.
Greek philosophy, by the way, had honest ways of going forward with inquiry without sidestepping skepticism. And the Greeks also had Poseidon to scare them away from such high-risk high-profits.

[I have separate arguments, if you're interested in really losing faith in fortune-tellers, that questions how good the guessing really is--maybe we're just guessing about how good is our guessing.]