It was an interesting example and maybe deserved a few more caveats to actually serve the point. After all, we've all heard a fire alarm of some sort in the past year (if not the past month) but how many were actual fires? (Technically the author said smoke which helps but not really.)

Where I was expecting the author to go:

- Clearly was talking about residential smoke detectors, not commercial. That could have been explicit.

- Smoke detectors do have a high false-positive rate but almost always at the right time. A home smoke alarm going off while I'm cooking is quite different to a smoke alarm going off when I'm sleeping. To the author's point, there are very few false positives while I'm sleeping so when they happen, I'm getting up.

Speaking of the commercial context, I wonder what sort of businesses would get a lot of false alarms and how that varies across industries.