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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

For the interested:

https://www.ft.com/content/1fcb4d60-b1df-11e8-99ca-68cf89602...

"Was this the right call? I think so. All our competitors also shunned any photos of Manhattan bank branches. The right to free speech does not give us right to shout fire in a crowded cinema; there was the risk of a fire, and we might have lit the spark by shouting about it."

Enraging. You're allowed to shout fire in a crowded theater if there is, you know, a fire. Tapping all the people in the box seats on the shoulder to give them a heads up about the fire so they can get to the exit before everyone stampedes for it is sociopathic, not social-minded.

I guess it's to his credit that he admitted to this, in the same sense that I'd credit a murderer confessing his crime and bringing the police to the body.

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While I mostly agree, it is a touch more subtle than this metaphor.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre doesn't typically cause the fire to get worse.

A major newspaper breaking news of an impending bank run, does have the likelihood of actually being the thing that triggers the bank run, or maybe making it much worse.

Just because I love torturing an analogy until I can get it to confess all its sins...

It's most like a theater having a squad of firefighters on hand, who most people ignore, as the theater has told them that the usher will let them know if a fire gets out of hand. One day the usher sees all the firefighters freaking out and quietly running for the exit, and his response is to flee for the exit himself and leave everyone remaining to fend for themselves.

I do get the moral complexities here, but the takeaway for us plebs in the audience is to not trust the usher to look out for our lives.

If you shout fire in a crowded theatre, people will be crushed as they run for the exit.

It depends on how you shout. People won't stampede if they trust the leading authority, if there is credibility and competence.

It's more like no one actually saw fire, but the back half of the theater snuck out and ran away because there were rumors of a fire. Authers saw this happening and had a chance to tell the people in the front of the theater that the whole back half had thought there was a fire and ran away, but he decided to just slink out the back and leave the front half to get burned.

I'd be ashamed to call myself a journalist if that was how I behaved.

What if the act of telling people in the front half caused a stampede, which trampled five people to death, knocked a candle over, and burned the whole theatre down?

The thing about bank runs is that if everyone, everywhere thinks there's a bank run happening, this will actually cause the financial system to collapse. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But if most people don't think a bank run is happening, then the system can weather a few bad banks popping.

Rather like the recent runs on supermarkets. Everyone thought there would be a shortage of goods, and so they created one.

There was an actual shortage, though, because people's needs changed. Nobody wanted to go to the grocery twice a week when most of the variables of the pandemic were unknowns. Nobody needed commercial toilet paper, but everyone started needing residential toilet paper. Some supply chains for staples were disrupted. (Meatpackers in NYC all getting COVID...)

Many supply chains are still disrupted, relative to changes in demand, just try buying a GPU right now.

unwalled:

https://www.businesstelegraph.co.uk/in-a-crisis-sometimes-yo...

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