It's Great to be Right

In June 1998 I was a guest on a radio show with one Bob Allen. Bob was in the process of relocating to get out of debt, stockpiling food and water, and preparing for "the end of life as we know it" when Y2K rolled around.

After an hour of debating Bob, who was way more prepared than I was, I was still unconvinced. His logic was this: You can't prove Y2K won't cause catastrophe, so what are you doing to prepare?

In an article on his Web site, Bob wrote:

The major disappointment of the hour was that the man 'opposing' my views [that's me -- Craig] really brought no evidence to the table for his position.  His major theme was that people (like me) who are concerned enough about Y2k to be making preparations are like those in the 1980's who worried about the impact of a planetary alignment, and those who believe in the 'end of the world' predictions of the Mayan Calendar.  About the only looney idea he didn't connect me with was some prophecy from Nostradamus.

Bob is not a programmer; he is an alarmist. What I brought to the table that night was experience. When the alarmists said that embedded chips could cause nuclear power plants to shut down I ask the obvious question: How do  embedded chips know what day it is? And do you think that the nuclear power industry is going to just sit there without contingency plans? Do you think they're not doing anything?

The alarmists seem to feel that because a thing is hard it can't be done. Nobody disagreed that Y2K was a hard thing to prepare for. What we differed on was that I (and many other computer technology professionals) felt it could be dealt with.

Some have proposed that these same embedded chips could cause elevators to stop or drop their inhabitants to the basement. Now let's stop right here. I've never written a program to control an elevator, but I know that programs do what you tell them to do. I'm trying to imagine why someone would write code that said "If it's January 1, 2000 (or January 1, 1900) then release the cables and drop the elevator to the basement." 

For one thing, the program in the elevator probably only opens the doors and tells the the lights to change as you pass floors. The cables are held on with clamps, and safety mechanisms detect if the unit is dropping too fast and apply the breaks. The programs in these devices are concerned more with lighting the numbers as you pass the floors than they are with releasing clamps. In fact they probably can't even do the latter.

Some Y2K alarmists have proposed that airplanes could fall out of the sky as their on-board clocks roll over to 2000. I'm not only a programmer, but I'm also a pilot so I know something of these systems. There's no piece of code on an airplane that says "If the date is January 1, 2000 (or January 1, 1900) then plummet out of the sky." In fact, there's no flight control devices at all that care what the date is. 35,000 feet is 35,000 feet no matter what day it is. North is north regardless of the year. The only system that cares anything about date and time is GPS, and that system was being very carefully reviewed for Y2K compliance and came up clean.

Like he said, I didn't connect Bob to Nostradamus, but I did bring up the Mayan calendar because it fit his logic. If our interpretation of the complex Mayan calendar is correct, the present age ends with a cataclysmic destruction of most of what you and I hold dear on December 23, 2012. You can argue that the Mayans had no way of knowing anything about the future, just like I argued that there's nothing in an airplane that tells it to drop out of the sky on a certain day. But the Y2K alarmist argues,  "How do you know something like this won't happen?" So my logic was, "How do you know the Mayans won't be right?" And therefore, "What are you doing to prepare?" The Y2Krazies shrug off this argument just like they shrug off all attempts at logic.

Bob captured the real problem with his position in this thoughtful reflection on his Web site:

It's hard to know how to pray in this situation.  In a very real sense, I pray that I'm wrong.  At a deep level I don't want to be right because of the awesome consequences that could mean for our culture.  And yet, on the other hand, I pray that I'm right because I don't want to consider that I could be causing unnecessary concern on the part of God's people.  I also realize that if I'm wrong, my credibility with my unsaved family members will be harmed for the much more important message of the Gospel. 

Like Bob, I believe that the Y2K alarmists have brought harm to their credibility over this issue. One secular computer expert attending a Christian conference on this issue commented that those in attendance didn't want to hear that it was possible to solve this. They only wanted to hear how bad it was going to be. He observed that since they weren't technical people it was impossible for their conclusions to be based on facts, but only on feelings.

By following feelings over facts, the alarmists have destroyed their personal credibility along with that of their church and other Christians. This gullibility that in my opinion characterizes fundamentalism today is the chief source of well-founded criticism against Christianity. Hiding behind a wall of spirituality, these uninformed Christians treat their persecution as a badge of honor instead of as what it really is: A public report card with an "F" in "thinking skills."

Bob went on:

Wednesday night there was a point at which I almost felt like 'folding my tent.'  Here I was pitted against a career programming expert who was calling me crazy.  Who was I to contradict him?  And yet the evidence (at least for the night) was on my side.  He could not refute any of the experts I quoted, except to simply claim they didn't know what they were talking about.  These things just couldn't happen.  Again, I hope he's right.  But I strongly feel that he's not.

But there was nothing to refute that night. His "evidence" consisted of quotes like "If Y2K came today, we wouldn't be ready." Well, sure... in 1998 few were ready. But we still had a year and a half to go. 

Many of the "evidence" passed around among the Y2K alarmists has proven to be mythical. My discussion of this interview with Steve Hewitt of Christian Computing magazine launched Steve on his year-long campaign against the Y2K disinformation peddlers. I'm grateful to Steve for doing the subsequent research that showed that most of the "evidence" coming from the doomsayers was outdated, inaccurate or made up.

So now I've been proven right and the Y2Krazies are saying, "Yeah, but wait until 1/3/00 or 1/10/00" or whatever. It's like they just can't admit defeat. They've been saying that 4/1/99, 7/1/99, 9/9/99, 10/1/99 and all kinds of other dates would be the beginning of the end and nothing happened on those dates. Now 1/1/00 is past and nothing happened then either. Why should we continue to believe these people?

But just to calm the fears of those of you who are still holding out hope for the end of the world:

It goes without saying at this point that Y2K was a non-event. It will continue to be a non-event. The "experts" who are still saying, "Just wait... this is only the 'end of the beginning'" are only saying that so you won't burst into laughter when they show you their bomb shelters. 

In my opinion, the Y2K alarmists have wasted years of their lives, destroyed their credibility and caused untold amounts of grief in those weak-minded people who followed their ill-conceived advice. I'm waiting for just one of them -- major figures like Michael Hyatt or Larry Burkett -- to admit they were wrong. They were so anxious to label people like me as ignorant and uninformed and accuse us of having no evidence, but let them be shown wrong and see how they react. 

Postscript:

Bob has graciously refreshed my memory of some of the details of our conversation that night and I have reflected some of our recent discussions in edits to the article above.