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Comment by rfugger | Hacker News Reader

I was in New Orleans in October 2002, and this guy was on the front page of the main newspaper predicting that within 20 years a category 5 hurricane was likely to whip around Florida and strike the city head on. He said the levies weren't high or strong enough, and that downtown New Orleans would be under 20 feet of water:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/predicting-katrina.html

I remember reading it with interest and then shrugging and moving on with my day. Three years later I remembered that moment and realized that as a society we just don't care that much about our long-term safety.

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An omnious quote from an article on l0phet:

  Wysopal offered this grim precedent: Cities were once 
  vulnerable to disastrous fires, which raged through dense 
  clusters of mostly wooden buildings. It took a giant fire 
  in Chicago to spur government officials into serious 
  reforms, including limits on new wooden structures, a 
  more robust water supply for suppressing blazes and an 
  overhaul to the city’s fire department.


  “The market didn’t solve the problem of cities burning 
  down,” Wysopal said, predicting that Internet security 
  may require a historic disaster to force change. “It 
  seems to me that the market isn’t really going to solve 
  this one on its own.”

  But here’s a frightening fact: The push to create tough 
  new fire-safety standards did not start after the Great 
  Chicago Fire in 1871, which killed hundreds of people and 
  left 100,000 homeless. It took a second fire, nearly 
  three years later in 1874, to get officials in Chicago to 
  finally make real changes.

[via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9760164]

Ironically enough, the architecture of the French Quarter in New Orleans is exactly an example of this. The way it was explained to me the French used wood until a mayor or some such proclaimed that all new buildings would use stone because the Spanish inspired buildings were the only ones left standing each time the city burned down.

Can we build relatively fire-resistant wooden buildings today, using modern technology?

We can build relatively fire-resistant buildings.

As for relatively fire-resistant wooden buildings? I suspect that it's easier to "just" use less wood.

Although note that there are a couple of things that do help. A steel roof as opposed to a shingled one. Having proper screens in the roof vents. Having fire-resistant siding. Tile floors (or something else that's non-flammable) as opposed to carpet or wooden ones. Not having gas lines to be ruptured by an earthquake. Having proper (read: not likely to catch something on fire in the case of an earthquake) electrical connections.

Lots of people predict lots of catastrophes. The trick is identifying the correct ones ahead of time. This is much more difficult than you are implying.

I think it's still very simple. We can view it through the concept of discount rate [0], basically people don't value a future event as much as a present one.

The world ending in 50 years is not worth making drastic efforts now, at least for most people. If your prediction is too costly on the short term, as accurate as it can be most people won't act on it.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intertemporal_choice

There is also something called the "critic's lament" that goes like this:

If you describe a situation in too dire terms, people will conclude nothing can be done about it and do nothing. On the other hand, if you describe a situation in too rosy terms, people will conclude it will work itself out... and do nothing.

I think the parent means something else. You can find people predicting all kinds of disasters for the next 5 years and maybe some of them are right. But it's very hard for governments to know which one are right. Especially considering some are of the form "there's more than 50% possibility something bad will happen". In this case even if the bad thing doesn't happen in 5 years, you are still not sure if you should disregard the warning.

The problem is made worse by the fact that your confidence in predictions also generally diminishes quickly as you go forward in time.

I suspect this is in part a side-effect of the Anglo-American (maturity-mismatched) banking system, which keeps long-term interest rates artificially low, leading to higher time preference.

Since interest rates are a man-made concept, one must wonder what a "natural" rate of interest actually is.

Words like "Artificial vs. natural" attempt to ascribe illegitimacy to what is mostly a policy difference.

Wouldn't a lower interest rate cause us to value the future more? (Or you mean, the natural interest rate should be higher?)

Lower interest rates increase your relative propensity to spend by lowering the opportunity cost of consumption. For example, if you have $10K and can get only a 1% annual return, you might as well take that trip to Vegas. If you could get a 15% return, though, you might rather stay home and rake in the interest.

OK, you basically have to compare your own internal discounting rate of consumption with the public rate of interest offered on savings.

If your own internal rate is higher than the public one, then indeed you should borrow to consume (or put off saving).

Companies only care about the public rate---if they have a higher rate of reliable return internally, they can keep borrowing money to invest until there's an equilibrium. A low interest rate makes companies more forward looking.

the discount rate applies to utility, which may or may not have any relation to the discount rate of money.

In this case that observation is unwarranted. There are some disasters which are difficult to predict and uncertain. There are others which are blindingly obvious or inescapable. Warning people that if a large hurricane hit a particular heavily populated city would be disastrous is not exactly extremely insightful when that city happens to live in one of the most heavily hurricane prone regions of the entire planet. As it turned out, Katrina was not even the worst case scenario, as it was not a Cat-5 when it hit New Orleans. Had it been, things would have been vastly worse. Similarly, a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake is not a question of whether it will happen but when. It absolutely will happen, and on a timescale similar to the age of the United States. That demands prudent planning and mitigation efforts.

If you live in Japan you can't merely shrug and say "oh, who can predict when an earthquake will come? nobody knows", no you live in an earthquake prone area, you need to plan. Similar if you live in tornado alley in the US you can't shrug and say "nobody can predict a tornado". You need to prepare.

In this case, it's not at all difficult.

Shocking really. Curious to hear rationale from someone that knew about the odds before moving to the PNW.

I tend to look at the insurance company's take on these kind of things for a more clinical rational analysis. Compare rates and try to ferret out why they are what they are. Yes, its come to that..

I'm starting to think about ditching earthquake insurance.

I'm in a modern home, so I'm not making much of a claim if there's a smallish earthquake. But if there's a big one, I assume the insurance company will just go under, leaving me out the premiums and with no recourse.

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