The moral of “chicken little” isn’t what you think it is. The key message is that bad authorities fail at listening and create perverse incentives towards misinformation, shirking their accountabilities with disastrous consequences.

People telling it to children are trying to silence their kids. They’re not focused on improving transparency, or on systemic outcomes, they just want to regulate individuals. So they are in fact the selfsame bad authorities.

The target of blame in the story is not the chicken.

Eh, pretty sure there's more than one moral there. No reason to ignore the "don't run off half-cocked spreading information you haven't confirmed or may not mean what you think" just because there's another lesson in there also.

This is the lie told by the failed managers of the community in which the chicken lived, hoping to shift the blame for their own poor attention to contingency planning onto a chicken.

If you have an early warning device with a high false positive rate, you don’t avoid catastrophe by ignoring the warning.

No, you don't ignore the warning to avoid a catastrophe, you ignore the warning to avoid alert fatigue, burnout and other bad effects.

If your only early warning device has a sufficiently high false positive rate, scrap it, or find another early warning device with a sufficiently different set of false positives and then require both of them to alert, before you pay attention.

In the Chicken Little story everybody except Chicken Little is eaten by the fox, do you mean the boy who cried wolf? Except oops, everybody dies in that one too.

Nobody listens to chicken little because he's overdramatic and hyperbolic, like most children who haven't had enough life experience to temper their reactions.

It's been awhile since I saw the film, but that's what I remember. Regardless, even taking my comment less literally and more like "it feels like a children's show" would still be an accurate take.

> It's been awhile since I saw the film, but that's what I remember.

Slightly OT, but you might want to clarify that you are talking about a film rather than the classical story.

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading it, it might be worthwhile to check it out, the version I read as a child had a suprisingly morbid ending for a children's book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny

You don't have to see the film, it was a text fable for a couple thousand years before that. Plus, I'm skeptical that they all die at the end of a Disney movie version of the story.

And as with the Pied Piper, it’s the fault of bad management.

Only an asshole blames the chicken. You had a high sensitivity early warning device, and muted it because you couldn’t handle the false positive rate? That is not the fault of the device.

None of that is the fault of the chicken. The sky would’ve fallen on the idiots in charge anyway. They’re just trying to shift the blame. This is the true moral of that particular fable.

Also, don’t go around tempering children; “seen but not heard” is dark ages, Victorian values nightmare fuel.

In both of those stories the reason that happens is bec the eponymous character loses all credibility by telling many lies, when they finally tell the truth no one believes them.

No, in the Foxy Woxy version everybody believes CL and accompanies them to warn the king. The problem comes when they believe that Foxy Woxy knows a shortcut. Point being: Chicken Little is a crappy analogy to use against doomsayers.

BwCW is a little better in the abstract, but still inapt for this.

Feel free to create one :-)