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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> The kids I was talking to were born around 1980, and one of them spoke up to say that she had never worried about nuclear war.

A related trick for predicting the future; things that everyone is worried about are likely to get solved. It is the stuff that people dismiss as impossible that is scary, because when it happens everyone is caught out in the same way at the same time.

That also leads to a decent heuristic for figuring out if someone is overconfident: listening to see if they can articulate a thoughtful list of things that could go wrong. If they don't have such a list then it is likely they won't have countermeasures in place when something goes wrong and will fail for no good reason. Or worse, they won't pick up on the early signs of failure when there is still time to react and salvage the situation.

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Dilbert’s creator Scott Adams has a rule for that: Adams Law of Slow-Moving Disasters.

Scott Adams himself would use this to mock people who are worried about climate change.

The problem with this is that if you don’t worry about it, actually it doesn’t get solved. For example everyone was worried about the Y2K bug and nothing happened because enough people in the right position got worried enough, invested in the fix and nothing happened.

So it’s a paradox. It’s also a common sense: If you prepare for something, you can prevent it, and if it materialises the damage inflicted would be minimised and if you were not worried about it, disaster happens.

Actually, the pandemic is an example of not worrying enough. A lot of people couldn’t got worried until corridors of hospitals become morgues. Months of news and footage were not enough to convince people to worry enough to wear a mask.

I wouldn't say that categorically: In california based on china's experience we set up huge triage centers in school gymnasia that never got used.

My car has a seatbelt and an Airbag, It never saved my life.

That said, of course it is possible to misuse the resources but I would't know about the specifics of California.

Seatbelts and airbags are low cost items, many COVID measures aren’t. I think something like only going 30 on a highway would be a more fitting comparison to our empty hospitals.

Airbags are not very low-cost in the context of cars but sure why not? Another low cost item is a mask and social distancing and there is a serious backslash to those too because "It's just a flu, [theGroupYouHate] is fear-mongering". I don't think that the issue is about balancing the costs and benefits here but as I said, it is possible to misuse the resources and have expensive solutions that don't solve anything.

Therefore, worrying is the force making you look for the solution but it's not a solution by itself.

Why was that? It all still baffles

Imagine a coin flip for a disaster to happen. You could spend large amount of resources to prevent 10x the damage if it occurs. Would you not? Now imagine the disaster didn't happen, would you consider these to be a waste of resources?

Now I am not saying that it wasn't waste of resources.

All I am saying is that the argument is flawed that resources are wasted because some disaster did not occur.

You could criticise the process that determined the chances of those gyms being needed faulty. But then bring arguments on how the process to determine the risk was flawed. Was the process of trying to determine risk from.another country's experience (china) flawed? If so, how should they have determined the risk?

I didn't mean to judge I'm just saying that it's not categorically the case that the US was underprepared, which is what parent poster claimed.

If you want an interpretation, it's that politicians like to prematurely take grandiose measures when smaller measures are more important, and for smaller measures like to make edicts when getting buy-in might be a better strategy for obtaining social compliance.

The blog post where he talks about slow-moving disasters has this gem:

> When I was a kid, it looked as if the country was heading for an eventual race war. Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting.

It's funny how things that seem impossible one year can start to seem much more possible a few years later. Problems that you think have gone away sometimes resurface.

Y2K was a good example of something that didn't happen, and probably in large part because everyone was working to stop it from happening. But to claim that it will always work that way is to assume that there is always something significant that can be done by the people who care.

There often is, but there are a lot of forces that work against this too - collective action is always hard, and it gets harder when it has prisoners-dilemma features or wealthy opponents who are better at spreading their viewpoint. Some problems may well have solutions that are too radical or costly to be deployed in the time that we have, and the fact that we haven't seen many catastrophic problems like that so far is a form of the anthropic argument.

The other thing is that the 'problems always go away or get drastically ameliorated if they are predicted by society', is an interesting example of an argument that undercuts itself. If enough people believe it, it'll stop being true.

In pre-social media proliferation ideas wouldn't move as fast, so you could have people who are worried and take care of things and a tolerable number of free riders can do their thing, so it wouldn't lead to a disaster. In the occasions where the worries were unsubstantiated the free riders can safely be the mavericks who didn't listen to the conventional wisdom and won.

The problem today is, I believe, ideas can travel faster than they can be challenged so we risk to have a maverick that is terribly wrong, go mainstream without being challenged and make all of us loose it all.

We can no longer have a stable equilibrium of conflicting ideas, everything would spontaneously go to one directions or another all the way, winner takse it all style.

> Y2K was a good example of something that didn't happen, and probably in large part because everyone was working to stop it from happening. But to claim that it will always work that way is to assume that there is always something significant that can be done by the people who care.

I worked on adjustments in cobol code for the y2k bug in accounting systems. We had to start well before, because contract with payment in the future did not work. Cobol at that time had no date type and stored the data as 3 integers, day, month and year. The job was basically to redo the calculation of terms adding 100 to year when it was greater than 00 and less than 50. (2000 to 2050). Anyway, who had a system susceptible to the bug, had no option but to make adjustments or lose their payment controls.

Edit: ading 100 to year, not 2000

I am fan of Dilbert but someone should help Scott Adams understand that y2k bug did not go away spontaneously(So he can stop preaching that we should not worry about climate change and so on because look they said the world would end in 2000 because of the y2k bug but nothing happened).

I like following the creators of the stuff I enjoys but Adams is proving to be a challenge for me. I should have stuck with the "never meet your hero" mantra.

I've led the team that worked for more than two years to prepare our products for the Y2K, in real time finance, and there was not a single but many points of failure, some completely not obvious before they were detected, so most of the time was spent on developing different tests and procedures to actually in advance test, verify and diagnose the big amounts of code where anything could be implicitly based on the assumptions that won't be true at 2000.

When there were (almost) no issues at the begin of 2000, it was because of a lot of concentrated work correctly done before, early enough. The luck was that the problem was in the consciousness of everybody making decisions, and that those making decisions had a good motivation to do the changes (e.g. the company can charge for fixes, or the company will not be able to sell the product if it's not fixed).

The real danger is when those who make decisions (and those who directly influence them) have a good motivation (from their narrow point of view) to continue ignoring the problem.

That's how the environments described by Octavia Butler develop.

>Today that seems impossible unless angry white guys start shooting.

which basically translates to "that seems impossible unless I just identified big obvious problem that makes it possible"

Isn't it the same idea as with WW2 planes.

They looked at damage from planes that came back after an attack and worked on the parts that weren't damaged. The idea being that planes that got shot in these areas couldn't make it back and those were the weak points.

This reminded me of a comment I posted a couple of months ago about my immortal youth. Rather than repeat it, I'll just link it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23868193

Contrapoint: people in the past worried about things that happened after.

> A related trick for predicting the future; things that everyone is worried about are likely to get solved.

Not really. It's because people get used to the fear. So we need a new fear to keep the population in check. Look at HIV. It scared people for 15 years or so, but people get accustomed to it. So we moved to other viruses. The soviet fear was being eroded so we got "terror". But after a while, even terror isn't as scary so they give us new a fear - china. Once that is done, it'll be on to other fears. Fear is the fundamental way to control a population.

On the HIV front, you might not be aware of how well that was solved, actually: there are drugs available and in regular use that prevent you from catching it (~99% effective), and in the extremely unlikely event that they do not, we have developed medications that allow you to live a normal life if you do.

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