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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

This line of thinking is backwards. Usually the problems that we don't solve are the ones where we should have taken stronger measures (i.e, "panicked") earlier instead of waiting for evidence of a threat.

We did listen to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") over Y2K bug and a lot of money was spent on it before January 1st, 2000, so that got solved swiftly. On the other hand:

- Had we listened to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") over the excess of the dot-com era, we wouldn't have pets.com and WebVan.

- Had we listened to the ones crying (i.e, "panicking") about the mortgage crisis, we wouldn't have gone through the 2008 recession.

- Had we listened to the ones warning about the need of controlling flights to China in January (i.e, "panicking"), half of Europe wouldn't be in lockdown.

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Another example that people seem to have basically forgotten about is the ozone hole. That could have been extremely nasty, had action not been taken.

Every circumstance you mentioned was not "solved" with panic, but was solved with thoughtful and persitant action.

If you are proposing the only way to "thoughtful and persistent action" is by being induced by panic. Then I would appreciate your evidence of this.

For example the 2038 problem is more serious that Y2k. My actions today (as soon as I found out about it) was to alter all current and future systems and plan to alter all current systems in place in the near future.

No panic needed to take this action.

Do you believe the only way to motivate people is to panic them? Do you not see a long term down side to this approach?

That's not the point being made. Panic was not what was done or suggested, it was the dismissive tone that such concerns were met with by Critics. GP's point was that the claims it was panic were wrong and harmful, not the quote unquote "panic".

Yes, and not just the dismissive tone. Even worse is the fact that the "we need more data" crowd mistakes Absence of Evidence for Evidence of Absence - as in "I will only wear the seat-belt after I witness a car-crash in front of me".

My point is that what you call "panic" is not really panic.

It is not panic to leave a building as fast as you can when a fire alarm rings - even if we don't know what caused the alarm to ring in the first place. I don't care about "numbers over hyperbole" or "science vs conjecture", I leave the building and assume that I am at risk by staying inside.

Likewise, it is not "panic" to propose that we err on the side of precaution and take measures that could contain an epidemic of uncertain risk and dangers, instead of adopting a "wait-and-see" attitude that might be fatal. Chinese doctors wanted to ring the alarm in November and were silenced by the Communist Party. When we got to December/early January and even the Party couldn't hide it anymore, we should've taken that more seriously and started to look for the "way out of the building", even if we didn't know yet how big is the fire/what caused it/who started it/etc.

Italy was one of the first countries to ban flights from China. Fat lot of good it did. But I agree that there should have been a stronger reaction, in terms of testing / tracing / isolating.

It did after it was already infected, by then they should've reduced the mobility of the people, close the football games, etc - which they didn't and led to people from Valencia going to Milan for the match, getting infected and spreading the thing faster still in Spain.

No "panic" enough.

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