Hacker News Reader

Comment by virissimo | Hacker News Reader

  And interestingly, the owners who spoke to Robb Report noted only a handful of times their rooms were ever used in an emergency. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.

The writer's implied argument can easily be shown to be defective by replacing the referenced object with an analogous one (device used to make bad rare events less bad given they happen):

  Interestingly, only a handful of drivers have every actually used their airbags. The notion of safety, however, is perhaps priceless.

View on HN

The basic fallacy in the writer's argument is that your odds of being prepared for a societal collapse are astronomically higher than your odds of needing an air bag.

The difference is distribution.

With apocalyptic events (pandemic, war, coup, hurricane, etc.), 100% of the population is affected in any given region perhaps every 50-200 years on average.

With serious car accidents, a fraction of a percent of the population is affected every day.

We don't tend to prepare well for rare events (like wars, famines, plaques, etc.). We do for frequent low-probability ones. Indeed, we're probably most worried about things rare enough to make the news (like school shootings), as unlikely as they are.

Panic rooms are all about being attacked in your own home. A general collapse of society isn’t required to use them.

Even in the safest countries, you will still have a small percentage of home invasions, kidnappings, and burglaries. That’s why people have locked doors, alarm systems, barred windows, guard dogs, actual guards, electrified fences, and finally panic rooms if all of the above fails.

Just for the record, history shows crises show up in even the safest countries. Some of these are slow and creeping, and some are rapid and sudden. On the other hand, if history is any indicator, you have maybe a 1/4 chance of having some regional, national, or global crisis situation hit during your lifetime. Many of those don't require a panic room, admittedly.

My odds of being unsafe in my home under normal circumstances are small. I'm not going to argue that if you have a billion dollars, you shouldn't get a panic room. Kidnapping a billionaire is much more worthwhile than a normal bloke, and I have no idea what the risk are. For most people, though, the odds are very low.

If I were rational, at my economic level, I'd have food stashed away, a few guns, medical supplies, and similar. However, I'm lazy. It's like backups. It's a good idea, but....

Richer people might have more, and poor people might have less. I've read about safety plans for rich people, and they're interesting. If you've got a few billion dollars, dropping a million or even a few million on a crisis plan is completely rational. Poor people, on the other hand, can't afford something like food+medicine stashed away (especially since they need to be rotated with expiration).

Airbags are cheap and car accidents are very common. I don’t think the analogy holds up.

"Cheap" isn't absolute, but is relative to your level of wealth. When airbags first hit the market, they were too expensive for most car buyers and, in fact, most cars didn't get them until decades later. Presumably, the people in the article are wealthier than you or I, and they aren't acting irrationally any moreso than the early adopters (relative to the the late adopters) of airbags.

Panic rooms will never get cheap - except in new construction - though.

Unlike cars, houses aren't replaced every 3-10 years. Retrofitting panic rooms will always be expensive - just like retrofitting airbags to a car without them (no one does it).

Similarly, the cost/benefit isn't there to everyone. Every passenger probably has a roughly equal chance of being in an accident, the likelihood that an average person needs a panic room is much lower than the top 0.001% (and probably bottom percentage in the hood would benefit to, but can't afford it, or even giving up the real estate to one, unless it was the primary bedroom).

Airbags were also expensive predominantly because they weren't being installed - and automakers DIDN'T want to install them: https://www.csmonitor.com/1988/0519/abelt.html. I'm not sure cost of production or installation was ever really the significant hurdle to their uptake.

Panic rooms are already cheap for the "rich people" mentioned in the article, which is the point I was making by characterizing "cheapness" as being relative, not absolute, so the analogy holds.

Exactly. If I hit the powerball, I might as well buy a bunker, get one of those VIP health screenings, etc. The risks may be low, but the relative cost is inconsequential.

but they'll never be cheaper for not ultra-rich people, nor will they have the utility to warrant the expenditure.

They're probably not worth it for most people. They may have enough utility to make it worth it if they're combined with other purposes (eg tornado cellar made out of block and reinforced door). They don't have to be extremely sophisticated, and they could be relatively cheap if one does it themselves. Sort of like the backyard bunkers during the cold war - they were obtainable for a middle class family if they built it themselves.

Also, car accidents are effectively instantaneous, then you're usually either dead or en route to a hospital within some exponentially distributed period of time.

Societal collapse can last anywhere from a week, in the event of a hurricane, to decades. Living self-sustained in relative comfort for a week is difficult, doing it for a month is much more difficult, and longer time periods approach impossibility very quickly.

re cheap: It's about hedging long tail risk. If you can easily afford it, it's probably a prudent buy.

I've given very long presentations to VPs about the same thing you summed up in one sentence. Well done. I may steal that for future presentations...

Airbags save around 2,000 people per year in the US. That means each person has a .0005% chance of needing it each year.

That's not "very common".

2.5 million burglaries occurr every year and FBI claim that about 68 thousand cases of injuries resulted from that.

Source: https://www.alarms.org/burglary-statistics/ (FBI says 1 million burglaries)

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That accounts for deaths prevented but does not credit any injuries avoided or made less severe. Those are going to be some multiple of deaths.

2000 seems really low. Do you happen to have a source for it?

https://www.nhtsa.gov/equipment/air-bags

It's actually less: 1,681/year over 30 years, although it seems like it went up toward the end of the range, so I wrote 2,000.

Car accidents aren't that common. Most people will not experience one.

77% of drivers have been in at least one accident. Your chances of getting into a car accident during a 1,000-mile trip are 1 in 366.

The average driver will file an insurance claim for an auto collision once every 17.9 years. This means that if you obtain your driver’s license at age 16, you will likely have a crash by the time you are 34. This means the average person has 3-4 vehicle accidents over the course of their lifetime

Last time I looked the stats for a lifetime were

1% die in a car accident

10% serious injury in a car accident

Accidents 1 / 500,000 miles.

https://www.torquenews.com/14335/how-safe-are-tesla-vehicles...

I have been in a few accidents, none that serious so far.

I've experienced four or five, and most people in my inner circle have experienced at least one. Anecdotal only, but I'd contest the claim that "most people will not experience one" at least within places that have mandated airbags in new cars for the last X years.

Ironically, and somewhat supportive of the airbags analogy, none of the accidents I had were in cars that had airbags, or those that were, the airbags didn't / needn't deploy. There was one, however, where seatbelts were critical.

Most people will know someone who has experienced one.

I have to wonder if spending the cost of the safe room on better pay/working conditions for your employees might buy you more safety. Home invasions are pretty rare, but workplace shootings are quite common and have a higher death rate.

I read your comment with the voice of comic book guy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com