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Comment by Etherlord87 | Hacker News Reader

As a safety inspector, I find to be more successful in teaching safety when I explain why some rules are in place. If not explained explicitly, people will figure an explanation on their own, and then sometimes they will be wrong - e.g. I'm safe to enter the hazardous zone, as it's a break time so no one works above = no risk of things falling down - except some things could be poorly secured and still fall down, or there could be a radiographic testing pending, or there could be holes in the floor… Knowing the reasons for a rule also make it easier to remember the rule.

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I wish more people understood your thinking. Two instructions you get at a doctor’s office before having a surgical procedure:

- Wear comfortable clothes.

- Don’t eat anything before surgery.

The first is so you don’t have tight clothes rubbing your achy body on the ride home. The second is so that you don’t vomit up your eggs Benedict, inhale it, and die an awful death. They’re both in the same size print in the same bullet list.

That stuff should be explained beforehand but I rarely hear it said that concretely. I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like:

- Don’t eat anything before surgery, because it might make you die.

would save lives.

> I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like: ... would save lives

It would make people more scared of surgeries since the wording is stronger, fear of surgeries causes a lot of issues as well including people dying since they refuse to get a surgery.

Fair. Maybe they could be in separate sections like “For your comfort” and “Critical safety instructions”. The broader idea is that people should know the gist of why they’re being told not to do a thing, and that it’s for their own good. In this case the instruction isn’t to avoid them puking so that a janitor doesn’t have to clean it up (along the same lines of “no black rubber soles on the gym floor”), but so it doesn’t put them in intensive care.

Humans spent the last 40,000 years not having explanations for rules because there were no (known) explanations for rules. Not an easy habit to shake, I think.

I work in train and aviation operational systems. We do safety training by taking teams to depots or sites of accidents where there are ruined systems.

Seeing the remains of an aircraft fuselage, or what a burned out diesel locomotive looks like -- and in the case of the train, smells like; it was being repaired -- really drives the point home.

A couple more slides on case studies and how they happened -- shout out of Admiral Cloudberg for doing a great job with that stuff; use their articles a lot -- and it's easy to convince people. Make it visceral, and they sure as hell will remember.

Presumably it's the same with a lot of science education as well. Physics and math for the sake of math is just rote memorization, but make them calculate rocket trajectories, then build a few model rockets and shoot them off, and those kids will be way more engaged. Like, I got really into biology when I started making basement hooch in college...

Tremendous comments in this thread that exemplify something I enjoy about HN, generative consumption. That's a fancy way of saying certain posts and comments get my mental wheels spinning, which I can transfer to whatever else I'm doing for the day.

Five minutes here for the blog, your comments, this reply, then I'm out and likely more productive than I was 6 minutes ago.

What would be the in-person equivalent (or pale approximation) of HN, for adults out of school?

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