Comment by bonoboTP
2 days ago
The thing is, people always want something to be done. And politicians want to do something. No matter what kind of action it is, someone knifed a kid on the street, we must ban knives of a certain length. A pilot downs a plane while the other leaves the cockpit - we must mandate two pilots always present. Someone hides explosives in his shoe - we must X-ray all shoes of all passengers forever. Etc.
The human brain can't take the idea that yeah an exceedingly rare thing happened and we're not going to do anything, because rare things do happen sometimes. And the medicine can be worse than the disease. We just accept that yeah, despite best efforts, some pilots will be hostile for whatever mental reasons. Not saying that is what happened in this case, but just saying that IF that happened.
We need more tradeoff thinking, instead of do something! thinking.
I'm seeing exactly this with the Texas floods. People are criticizing them for not installing an expensive warning system. "Do something!"
But they decided that based on the frequency of floods it was not the best place to spend money.
That was a bad decision. They had major problems during the winter of 2021 too. It's all well to talk about tradeoffs but clearly Texas has under prepared for major weather events and it's getting people killed (not to single them out - they're certainly not the only ones). It's not a coincidence that there were 2 catastrophes in 4 years.
Acknowledging tradeoffs doesn't mean there aren't real problems or that something doesn't need to be done, it's only meaningful when comparing different proposed solutions. What is your alternative to the early warning system with better tradeoffs?
> What is your alternative to the early warning system with better tradeoffs?
I know little about this, I'm simply responding to the people who constantly demand that people do something, anything, and insist that all possible actions be taken without consideration to their cost.
The real world is full of tradeoffs, and it's easy in hindsight to say "That was a bad decision", it's not that easy ahead of time.
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