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What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies? Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fe

What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies? Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear. Rebuilding after disasters is a tried and true method.

projectileboy 6y ago
That approach was not incredibly effective in New Orleans in 2005.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  It's not incredibly effective for the disasters that happen, no. It still may be the right approach, though. There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones. Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
  - the_gastropod 6y ago
    Using Texas as an example again: 10 years ago, 1M+ Texans lost power due to unusually cold temperatures. Last week, the same thing happened. This wasn't some unpredictable event. It just wasn't considered sufficiently profitable to prepare.
    - shakezula 6y ago
      Which is a really solid argument for why we maybe shouldn't put profit first when it comes to things like our energy grids.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Well, its just that people who made the decision are not paying for all the business disruption, productivity and health damages (including deaths) they caused. For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
        TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Yup. Money is a surprisingly good metric for these things, but it's how you count money that matters. That a power grid can collapse due to a predictable natural event tells us that the accounting we use here is wrong, as it doesn't correctly allocate costs of failure.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    The cost of a company not preparing for a catastrophe is hugely externalized, resulting in a lopsided risk equation that represents a market failure. In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk. In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
    - mjevans 6y ago
      Losses, and culpability of guilt (responsibility) should follow profits. Doing enough to be prepared and attempt to avoid preventable failures should be built into market players not going to jail or bankruptcy.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    > Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it. - Food - Power - Transportation - Housing/Shelter These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible." These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't. So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      OK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely different because of scale; completely different because the intersection of the solutions is very close to the empty set. So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
      - njarboe 6y ago
        If you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for disasters in winter also.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Carrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an overlap with military concerns, which is tied to unlimited budget.
        bordercases 6y ago
  - projectileboy 6y ago
    You make good points. Please consider, however, that historically those decisions have not been made on relative likelihood, they’ve been made based on who we didn’t care about. New Orleans is a prime example - experts had warned for decades about what would happen if NO were to be hit by a cat 5.
HarryHirsch 6y ago
Tell that to the people of Texas.
agallant 6y ago
By that logic, no preventive measures should ever be taken. But individual measures have varied costs and returns, and it is worth considering those and selecting measures that make sense. Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?
maxerickson 6y ago
Inexpensive mitigations in this case are things like evaluating and improving transformer designs so they are more resilient to these events, maybe speeding up replacement of some transformers (if they are especially susceptible or very critical) and maybe having a few more spares around. Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  Definitely having spares around. We should aim to be able to bring back power to major cities (around 30-50% of the population) within a month.
- NortySpock 6y ago
  And it would be good if the transformers / grids were able to detect and self isolate during this kind of electrical weather. Far better to have to go manually restart a safed transformer than have to replace a destroyed one.
the_gastropod 6y ago
Who's suggesting we be 100% prepared for all contingencies? At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops. Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.
travisporter 6y ago
I'll attribute this comment to the CS way of thinking of edge cases to break your code, not a strawman argument.
Alex3917 6y ago
> What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies? No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety. See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-hum...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jordan_curve 6y ago
  It’s pretty weird reading that Atlantic article in a world with covid.
- the_af 6y ago
  > even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
    In the US, 0.01% of the population dies in car crashes each year (I didn’t misplace a decimal, it’s actually a fairly rare event). If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks. I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).
tshaddox 6y ago
> Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear. I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  > thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline. Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.
smadge 6y ago
In this scenario you would have to rebuild all of civilization. I do not think modern civilization could survive the loss of the entire electrical grid.
gdubs 6y ago
I mean, aren’t we talking more about the Black Swan events that are worth investing in?

projectileboy 6y ago

That approach was not incredibly effective in New Orleans in 2005.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
It's not incredibly effective for the disasters that happen, no. It still may be the right approach, though. There are many possible disasters. Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. We don't have enough time and resources to prepare for all possible disasters. So we put more effort into preparing for the most likely ones, and sometimes one of the less likely ones gets us. Note that there are more "less likely" scenarios than there are "more likely" ones. Also note that, after a disaster has occurred, it suddenly seems very probable, which makes it look like we mis-evaluated which risks were likely. On the other hand, sometimes we really do mis-evaluate or under-prepare. It's hard, in advance, to get the balance right. And even if we did, after a disaster we say "yeah, should have seen that one coming".
- the_gastropod 6y ago
  Using Texas as an example again: 10 years ago, 1M+ Texans lost power due to unusually cold temperatures. Last week, the same thing happened. This wasn't some unpredictable event. It just wasn't considered sufficiently profitable to prepare.
  - shakezula 6y ago
    Which is a really solid argument for why we maybe shouldn't put profit first when it comes to things like our energy grids.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Well, its just that people who made the decision are not paying for all the business disruption, productivity and health damages (including deaths) they caused. For some reason if you mop the floor without the "wet" sign, you could be liable, but if you let the whole powergrid collapse twice, you bear no fault
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Yup. Money is a surprisingly good metric for these things, but it's how you count money that matters. That a power grid can collapse due to a predictable natural event tells us that the accounting we use here is wrong, as it doesn't correctly allocate costs of failure.
- Hammershaft 6y ago
  The cost of a company not preparing for a catastrophe is hugely externalized, resulting in a lopsided risk equation that represents a market failure. In texas, the cost of that market failure can be measured in preventable deaths, none of which private energy companies needed to account for when managing risk. In the event of a solar flare knocking out national power for months, the cost could be the collapse of modern civilization. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
  - mjevans 6y ago
    Losses, and culpability of guilt (responsibility) should follow profits. Doing enough to be prepared and attempt to avoid preventable failures should be built into market players not going to jail or bankruptcy.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  > Being prepared for all of them takes all your time and resources - more than all, in fact. Most of the time preparing for most disasters has a few common features to it. - Food - Power - Transportation - Housing/Shelter These are common issues with every single possible disaster that can happen. So instead of preparing for "every disaster possible", you need to prepare for the outcome of "every disaster possible." These four things can reduce lives lost by a significant amount, and as a 21st century society we need to limit our growth to the point where we're keeping up with the potential disaster situation, less we regress a thousand years because we didn't. So no you're absolutely wrong. You don't need to plan for disasters at this scale. You plan for the outcomes of it.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    OK, but... take power, for example. Ensuring power after a Carrington Event is completely different from ensuring power after cold weather in Texas. Not completely different because of scale; completely different because the intersection of the solutions is very close to the empty set. So, while your "consequences" approach has a lot of merit, what you have to do to handle the consequences still depends significantly on what the cause of the problem was. Which brings you back to preparing for multiple scenarios. (I'll give you this, though: It may be fewer scenarios than a cause-based approach.)
    - njarboe 6y ago
      If you do any camping you can easily be prepared for most disasters that happen when it's not winter. Buy some serious sleeping bags and you could be ready for disasters in winter also.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Carrington Event does have overlap with EMPs, if I understand my physics correctly, so there's at least an overlap with military concerns, which is tied to unlimited budget.
      - bordercases 6y ago
- projectileboy 6y ago
  You make good points. Please consider, however, that historically those decisions have not been made on relative likelihood, they’ve been made based on who we didn’t care about. New Orleans is a prime example - experts had warned for decades about what would happen if NO were to be hit by a cat 5.

HarryHirsch 6y ago

Tell that to the people of Texas.

agallant 6y ago

By that logic, no preventive measures should ever be taken. But individual measures have varied costs and returns, and it is worth considering those and selecting measures that make sense. Would you never screen for cancer because you can use chemotherapy?

maxerickson 6y ago

Inexpensive mitigations in this case are things like evaluating and improving transformer designs so they are more resilient to these events, maybe speeding up replacement of some transformers (if they are especially susceptible or very critical) and maybe having a few more spares around. Of course nothing will make sure we are 100% prepared, but there can be a lot of value in reevaluating and improving things.

aaomidi 6y ago
Definitely having spares around. We should aim to be able to bring back power to major cities (around 30-50% of the population) within a month.
NortySpock 6y ago
And it would be good if the transformers / grids were able to detect and self isolate during this kind of electrical weather. Far better to have to go manually restart a safed transformer than have to replace a destroyed one.

the_gastropod 6y ago

Who's suggesting we be 100% prepared for all contingencies? At a high level, there's a tension between efficiency and resiliency. Profit growth necessarily demands an increase in efficiency, and resiliency necessarily drops. Texas's power grid is a recent good example of this issue. Texas chose to skip many resiliency measures w/r/t cold temperatures even though they suffered this same issue 10 years ago. The expense, for the businesses, may be lower to rebuild after disasters. But these types of catastrophes often cost people their lives.

travisporter 6y ago

I'll attribute this comment to the CS way of thinking of edge cases to break your code, not a strawman argument.

Alex3917 6y ago

> What would life look like if we tried to be 100% prepared for all contingencies? No one is suggesting that it would make sense to be 100% for all contingencies. But most people wear their seat belts, even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash. So it would seem rational to invest at least as much into preventing Carrington-type events as we invest into car safety. See also: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-human-extinction-isnt-that-unlikely/480444/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-hum...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jordan_curve 6y ago
It’s pretty weird reading that Atlantic article in a world with covid.
the_af 6y ago
> even though your chances of dying in a Carrington-type event are greater than your chances of dying in a car crash That can't be right. Or am I misunderstanding something? Your chances of dying in a car crash are higher than dying in a global extinction level disaster. How likely are car crashes with fatalities? How likely are extinction level disasters?
- fshbbdssbbgdd 6y ago
  In the US, 0.01% of the population dies in car crashes each year (I didn’t misplace a decimal, it’s actually a fairly rare event). If there’s a 1% annual chance of a single event where 1% of the population dies all at once, that makes the risk dying of dying in such an event the same as dying in a car crash. If if either of those numbers are higher than 1%, it’s more likely than dying in a car crash. I’m not sure if the comment you responded to is correct about the numbers for this particular risk, just showing how rare extreme events can be important risks. I think people tend of overrate rare events that only hurt a few people at a time (like shark attacks and lightning strikes) and underrate rare events that hurt a lot of people at once (like pandemics, extreme weather events, or other society-scale disasters).

tshaddox 6y ago

> Probably similar to people living in a cave and refusing to leave it out of fear. I'm not sure where you're getting that. People living in a cave are far less prepared than we are for pretty much any potential large-scale disaster we already know about (never mind the ones we don't know about yet!). Although you oppose it (that's good!), you seem to be making a classic mistake by thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. But the vital point is that stasis only protects us against the danger posed by new technologies, while almost certainly condemning us against other inevitable dangers like disease, earthquakes, weather disasters, climate change (man-made or otherwise), meteor impacts, supernovae, and probably lots of unknown things we would never learn about until they hit us.

vagrantJin 6y ago
> thinking that technological stasis or regression is the way to prepare for or protect against disasters. Well put. Regression is a very real danger in all civilizations and it's inevitable. It is the full time job to actively resist decline. Reminds me of that plan to intercept an earthbound meteor/asteroid. It sounds absurd - until we hit an existential crisis when one such object is in our trajectory and all the bullshit stops. The sad thing is not IF but When. Could be a year or a million years.

smadge 6y ago

In this scenario you would have to rebuild all of civilization. I do not think modern civilization could survive the loss of the entire electrical grid.

gdubs 6y ago

I mean, aren’t we talking more about the Black Swan events that are worth investing in?