Help Wanted: Must be Foreigner with Thick Skin
February 8th, 2009Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
South Korea is looking for someone to provide accurate weather forecasts and take the heat when they bust. The candidate should be a foreigner of high scientific standing. He or she must also have a thick skin, because the public has little patience for inaccurate weather forecasts. Here are some details:
To soothe negative public sentiment, the state weather agency has decided to recruit a foreign expert, pledging a fat pay package.
The Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said Wednesday it has contacted several renowned weather experts in countries showing a high forecast accuracy including the United States, United Kingdom and Japan since last year. . .
This unprecedented recruitment campaign is in line with the KMA’s efforts to restore public confidence, which has been substantially undermined due to incorrect forecasts.
But the question is whether the non-Korean is capable of withstanding knee-jerk public sentiment if the prediction goes wide of mark.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Why are Koreans intolerant of bad weather forecasts? Or what is it about their culture?
I understand that people don’t like when it rains during their kid’s beach birthday party after it has been forcasted to be sunny; but, the above makes it sound like the public may be a bit more harsh then just showing general disappointment.
Anybody know?
February 9th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
When the East Asian countries like Japan, Taiwan and then Korea started exporting to the US, their first products were generally cheap, shoddy merchandise, which conveyed the impression that that was all they could produce rather than that is what we were willing to buy. In point of fact, all of the cultures of East Asia put a premium on quality, attention to detail and accuracy. One only needs to look at examples of their classical art to confirm that. You can check this reference as an example: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Along_the_River_7-119-3.jpg
China, Japan and Korea are also “shame” cultures rather than “guilt” cultures and “failure” is viewed as something of a personal responsibility. The suicide rate among students in Japan attributable to their failure to meet high grading expectations (a level of “failure” which would be considered honor-roll performance in US schools) is a perennial concern. A few spectacularly wrong meterological predictions would fall into that category of “failure”.
I am sure that Korean meterologists are just as competent as their western counterparts, but all of us have a tendency to point to other countries as being somehow superior in one area or another (look at the health care debate in the US, for example, and film-maker Michael Moore’s, uhmmm, interesting take on it). The recent attention given to climate concerns, especially in the West, might give the impression of greater precision in the field than is warranted and lead to the unwarranted assumption that Western or foreign metereologists would not have had such spectacular “failures”. In the face of that kind of criticism, Asians have a tendency to apologize and accept personal responsibility for the failure to live up to the high expectations of others, even when they are patently unreasonable expectations. In the not very distant past such shouldering of responsibility included expunging the shame of failure with suicide. Taking responsibility by resigning one’s position is a more likely outcome today.
Bringing in a foreign metereologist would allow them to say “Look! We’re bringing in the best there is and no one could do any better.” Criticism will be deflected and the attrition rate among meteorologists reduced. I don’t know the specifics, here, but it makes sense to me. Americans can seem very harsh in areas that seem of no consequence to others.
February 11th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
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February 20th, 2009 at 9:39 pm
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