The Myth of Panic (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of Panic (2021)

palladiummag.com

39 pointsapsec11250 comments

He leaves out examples that contradict his thesis, like the 1977 New York blackout which lead to widespread arson and looting. (1) Plus similar widespread rioting in Montreal in the 60s when the police went on strike. (2) Wiki also suggested a page for 'list of incidents of civil unrest in the US', which appear to number in the hundreds. (3) My guess would be that whether your city 'panics' or not just depends on a bunch of different circumstances, and that there's no one conveniently pat answer.

I used to follow Tanner on Twitter and he seems like a nice guy, but he's definitely part of this new generation of self-appointed 'intellectuals' that got famous on social media, have no actual subject-matter expertise in any 1 field, and just handwave stuff. He is the director of what's apparently a 1 man think thank, and he supposedly 'focuses on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia' despite having no graduate degrees or military/intelligence record that I'm aware of. (Also has nothing to do with this piece). Again, nice guy who I'm sure means well, but basically a self-appointed Twitter 'expert'. Call me old-fashioned but I'd like to see my experts have some actual qualifications in something

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...

Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency.

Civil unrest is not the same as panic.

You can tell from France that French people just naturally like rioting.

(Americans have a highly mythologized idea of protesting based on misunderstanding the Civil Rights movement, so they think that 1. all protesters have strong morally correct political causes and 2. protesting does something good for those causes, and therefore think the French are noble workers fighting for their rights here. In fact they don't accomplish anything, the government just ignores them and are never voted out for this, and they're mostly advocating for wild conspiracy theories anyway.)

That's a not widely held belief of the French protesters in America. I suspect most of us (certainly most of the people I know) see the various strikes in the news and are happy we don't live there.

On a personal anecdote, I recall a French student who attended my university in America comment at one point how surprised he was by the amount of content our courses got through, since we weren't frequently interrupted by strikes of one sort or another.

That said, I do agree with the most of the rest of your points. Plenty of people here have overly romanticized views of protest and civil disobedience.

Even Duolingo repeatedly cites French workers being on strike (en grève) in its examples. They sound peaceful, but inconvenient.

The same America that's legalized hitting protestors with your car?

The protestors are there because they think they have an effect. The people trying to legally kill them want to stop them, because they also think they have an effect (and oppose it). Both of them are wrong.

(I should say this also comes from a misunderstanding of Vietnam War protests. Namely, they think they stopped the war, when in fact they didn't do nothin.)

Those protesters are clearly being noticed. That is the intended effect.

Being noticed isn't the same as changing anything. They may have lowered their expectations, but I think they mostly want to actually change things.

(Though like anything else with a lot of young people, some of them just want to get laid, and it works for that.)

The New York City blackout and the Murray Hill riot are examples of criminals taking advantage of a situation where the police were on strike or unable to respond, not of a panic. I'm not going to go through the entire list of incidents of civil unrest in the United States, but the first entry is described as an anti-government protest, not a panic either.

Who do you expect to appoint intellectuals?

> Who do you expect to appoint intellectuals?

I figured it was the magic dragon MENSA keeps in their vault.

Another example: the hoarding of toilet paper after the pandemic lockdowns. Granted, this was panic writ very small, but it was panic nonetheless. Suddenly everyone was hoarding TP because everyone thought there wouldn't be any available, thus turning the TP shortage into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Not sure what counts as hoarding. I've always bought it in bulk and prefer to have at least a 6 months supply, even 12 months seems reasonable. It does not spoil, I can buy when it's on sale, and it's relatively compact and stacks well without wasting storage space.

Though, I suppose there were people who were buying it when they did not expect to use it personally. Fuck those people.

When the store shelves are empty for months despite the fact that nothing has actually changed in terms of underlying supply or demand, that's hoarding.

Demand did change though - people weren't pooping as much at offices, restaurants, and retail stores. All those places tend to use "commercial" toilet paper that is not available in your average grocery store.

If you looked at commercial suppliers during 2020, you were much more likely to find available supply, though it may be a bit awkward using one of those giant rolls at home when it won't fit on a standard dispenser.

In more ways than one.

All my friends just installed bidets instead. Now we need far less toilet paper. It started as a bit of a joke but we're now believers. Try it.

It was my understanding that because most businesses were closed for an extended period of it the TP-production companies had to shift their production lines from the god-awful paper typically used in commercial settings to the paper typically used in homes.

A few weeks into the shelter-in-place order, I did see commercial TP appearing on the shelves in my local corner stores. A while later, I started seeing household TP appearing again.

I'm not claiming that there was no hoarding, nor that there was no profiteering by folks buying up lots of stock and selling "on the street" at inflated prices. I am definitely claiming that closing most businesses for an extended period absolutely changed the underlying ratio of crappy commercial TP to better home TP required... which apparently isn't something one can respond to overnight.

"For months" is surely an exaggeration? What has changed in supply and demand is that much less toilet paper had to be distributed to workplaces, and much more close to people's to homes.

> "For months" is surely an exaggeration?

Not where I live (San Francisco Bay area). It was literally months. Fortunately, we always buy in bulk and had a pretty good supply in stock when it hit the fan, and I was able to get resupplied through Amazon once. But lockdown happened in March and it was May before I saw a roll of TP on a shelf again, and then stores were limiting purchases for many months after that.

> less toilet paper had to be distributed to workplaces

Yeah, that's what everyone said. But I couldn't find industrial TP either, either in person nor on-line.

> But I couldn't find industrial TP either, either in person nor on-line.

Did you try the smaller corner stores? A few weeks into the shelter-in-place order in San Francisco, I started seeing the crappy single-ply commercial TP appearing on their shelves. (And throughout shelter-in-place, there was somewhat-lower-than-usual-but-nonzero amounts of paper towels.)

At that point in time, larger places like CVS/Walgreens and Safeway were usually totally out of all paper -er- cleaning(?) products... the difference in stock levels never ceased to amaze me.

(Luckily, I happened to have enough household-grade TP to last me until household-grade stuff started appearing on those shelves again.)

> Did you try the smaller corner stores?

I live on the peninsula. We don't have small corner stores.

Oh bummer. I take it convenience stores were also plumb out?

The one in our neighborhood was. I didn't do an exhaustive survey. But I did check a lot of drug stores and found nothing.

I had enough around the house to give some away and still made it several months. If you're at the store and your brand is on sale, and you can't remember if you have plenty, buy some more. No big deal, it stores easily. At some point you're like, wait I have a lot, and then you don't buy anymore until you run out in one bathroom and realize you're getting low.

Everyone likes the toilet paper example for that time period because of how absurd sounding it is, but that's not all that happened. Lots of other things also vanished off the shelves because people suddenly started buying a ton more than usual - bread and peanut butter being the two that stood out most to me.

There was a shortage of five-gallon buckets. I still haven't figured that one out.

toilet

Exactly - the reporting on hoarding fucked me off because it inevitably led to more hoarding.

News media made that happen by putting the idea in peoples' heads via telling them not to do it.

I thought the main reason of the shortage was that suddenly everybody worked from home which disrupted the finely balanced "just in time" production and distribution? (eg highly simplified, there was always enough toilet paper produced, just of the wrong type, and the rest got stuck in "transit")

I heard it was just that TP is cheap and large, so you can take home a lot of it and once you've done so it feels like you've done quite a lot to prepare and now you have permission to stop preparing. A pacifier, basically.

My experience of a natural disaster confirms this from the article:

> He concluded that disasters “result however temporarily in what may be regarded as a kind of social utopia.” “While the natural or human forces that precipitated the disaster appear hostile and punishing,” Fritz observed, “the people who survive become more friendly, sympathetic, and helpful than in normal times.” In disaster scenarios, shared fear and suffering create “an intimate group solidarity among the survivors.” When the world suddenly falls apart, people do not grow more selfish, violent, or irrational, but more altruistic, caring, and calm.

After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, killed 185 people, devastated large sections of the city [0], suddenly everyone was nicer, for about 3 months - giving way more in traffic, smiling more at strangers, checking on neighbours they'd never spoken to before.

Then one day, an old lady starts ramming my shopping trolly at the supermarket checkout because she thought I was going too slow, and I thought to myself, "Ah, Christchurch is getting back to normal".

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

Was the arson and looting because the power outage provided panic, or because it provided opportunity? Same question about the police strike.

If you're living in a state where the social contract is not functioning and people's behavior is constrained by some other thing, then their behavior will change when the constraint goes away. That's different than panic.

The bombings of London during WW1 and WW2, and the Allied bombings, were attempts to cause panic among the civilians and thus the countries to collapse. It never happened.

Although the V1 attacks did not cause panic and caused little damage, they were cheap to make and fire, and caused the British to divert enormous resources to stop them - resources that were not brought to bear on Germany.

On the other hand, while the V2 attacks also did little damage and caused no panic, they were terrifically expensive for the Germans to make, and was a huge diversion of their resources. Since there was no defense against them, they did not divert Allied resources away from attacking Germany.

The "defense" against V2 attacks was to conquer the areas from which they came. Which was what the armies in France were going to do anyway. They were a blow to morale, since the Brits were sick of war by then and thought it was almost over.

I don't think any of the city bombings in WW2 caused "panic."

From the article:

"If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged."

"Further, the high morale and solidarity that citizens exhibit during a disaster dissolve the individualist outlook that elites have long learned to control and maintain. The seemingly positive and prosocial solidarity response of the population is itself a threat to the mechanisms of elite power in our society. Just as disasters empower normal citizens on the ground, who have no choice but to take fate into their own hands, they leave elites feeling distant and helpless. Chess and Clarke call this state of affairs “elite panic:” a fearful distrust of the populace that prompts leaders to restrict information, over-concentrate resources, and use coercive methods to reassert authority in the face of temporary breakdowns in public order. This style of response poses an active danger to disaster survivors and, ironically, creates the very resistance to authority that leaders fear most."

A similar view comes from, of all people, the CEO of Waffle House. Waffle House prides itself on staying open through disasters. This is formal policy; they have emergency plans, supplies, and equipment. Waffle House does not use computer systems to transmit orders between order counter and kitchen, and that's on purpose. The Waffle House CEO says that if you can keep the Waffle House, the CVS, and the WalMart up, communities will start to recover from a disaster by themselves.

This is a good goal. One worth bearing in mind given the other discussion today about cyber attacks. Entire fast food chains should not go down because they can't communicate with HQ.

Interesting that Fritz already debunked the myth of panic during WWII, while rather recently, during the last pandemic, governments delayed correctly informing of the crowd, due to that myth.

So myths will be myths?

Submitted for consideration: Perhaps situations when the populace "panics" and does something stupid are usually also the times you couldn't have kept it secret anyway.

Isn't it amusing that censorship is there to protect the morals of civilians, yet the censors are not corrupted by viewing it?

I can believe it. Despite scientists and politicians saying the climate situation is dire, there is no panic.

Dire is not immediate.

Wait until we have our first planet-wide crop failure.

Unlikely to happen any time soon as the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones (just different ones than now).

And it won't take a planet-wide crop failure, just a wide-spread one or other major disruption. Arguably we (or rather the poorer nations in Africa) came close, when Ukraine found it difficult to ship their harvest.

> the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones

Yes, but large-scale crop production is not so easy to move.

> it won't take a planet-wide crop failure

Yes, by "planet-wide crop failure" I didn't mean that there won't be a harvest anywhere, just that production will drop low enough that there is no more surplus. I'm pretty sure that will be enough to destabilize our geopolitics, and it will be all downhill from there for quite a while.

I panicked for a few months, as a naive college student in my early 20s, then I realized there was no stopping it and decided to position my family as best as possible to live through it.

But if you have nothing better to do than panic, then by all means do so. At some point I might be able to market you a product based on that panic, which will be a few more dollars toward building my family's ark.

> then I realized there was no stopping it

This is not what the IPCC reports say and so there is no reason to believe it.

(For one thing there is no "it" to stop because it's a continuous value you can reduce, and for another we are reducing it. And no, we're not just exporting it to China.)

As an individual, there's not much one can do to spur collective action on climate change. Taking action to mitigate the personal impact is reasonable though; things like picking housing that's unlikely to flood during extreme weather.

I think this is the opposite of correct. The most impact we can have is by improving transportation patterns, which come from improving local land use, which in the US are controlled by city council meetings that only retired busybodies show up to. So show up to them and join a YIMBY chapter, or become a traffic engineer or something.

On the other hand, you have no actual personal impact on it unless you own a private plane, so there is nothing to mitigate. Recycling isn't going to help.

Or you could try emitting silicon dioxide into the atmosphere and hope nobody stops you. We're probably just going to solve it that way anyway.

Not mitigating climate change personally. Mitigating the effects of climate change personally.

So, choosing not to live in a house that's right on a low bank shore... Because it's likely to flood and disrupt your life. Be sure to have defensable space around your home, because wildfires are happening in more places. Consider access to drinking water and how to shelter your home from heat.

The thing about that is, you don't need to be aware of climate change to have to do it. You will simply be forced to do it because your insurance company is going to make you.

But the only solution is move. There is no way you can make a high fire risk zone safe, and water/summer temperatures won't be an issue outside tropical regions (so the US will be okay) but if you are in one of those you can't fix it.

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