4 ms·

I wonder who will hold political office when this happens so they can say "no one could have foreseen this type of devastation."

deleted 6y ago
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thaumasiotes 6y ago
Every type of devastation, possible or not, has been "foreseen" by someone out there.
- xg15 6y ago
  Yes but some are "foreseen" by lunatics and some by empirical science. This is the old "there is no truth, everything is subjective, so according to my alternative facts, I was in the right and everyone else was wrong" spiel again.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    At the end of the day it all comes down to subjective decisions on what predictions are reasonable and what are not.
    - reallydontask 6y ago
      Ultimately you are right, but this is basically Popper vs Kuhn. I can confidently say that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow from the East and set on the West, to pretend otherwise is sheer folly.
      - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
        Yeah you can always dumb it down to prove whatever point you want to prove but decisions like "do we spend a billion bucks building the levy one foot higher to prevent the flood or do we assume the flood will happen and spend a billion bucks on flood mitigation in our building code and emergency preparedness plans" are full of ambiguity and nobody knows the right answer ahead of time.
        reallydontask 6y ago
        I was dumbing it down to prove that consensus is possible, the same can be achieved on your scenario though the consensus could well be less unanimous, I don't know enough about this area to have an opinion, though I suspect that people would prefer the former to the latter.
        adamsea 6y ago
        It’s more like spend one hundred million to make the levy higher _and_ on flood mitigation, versus spend a billion (plus maybe lose tons of money due to economic damage) dealing with the effects of the disaster. Prevention is usually cheaper (and TFA in this case says it is).
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - CraigJPerry 6y ago
    How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. If we’re only looking at the numbers, that’s a pantomime show. In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.
    - xxpor 6y ago
      This is why credentialism is pervasive.
    - thomascgalvin 6y ago
      > How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. Experts have widely decried airport security procedures as nonsense, including the penetration testers who are charged with proving whether or not these measures are effective. An evidence-based examination has therefore proven these measures are, if not lunacy, at least not practical. Intelligence officers, on the other hand, wrote up detailed explanations of how airplanes could be hijacked and turned into missiles. These people were experts in their field, and their hypotheticals were all reasonable. They were ignored, essentially, because people didn't want to deal with it. When it comes to the dangers posed by hurricanes, it's fairly easy to determine if someone is coming from an evidence-based perspective, or a lunacy-based perspective. Are they engineers? Do they understand weather patterns and hydrology? Are they talking about how likely the events they're talking about are likely to occur over the next five, ten, one-hundred years? Or are they screaming about how God is going to level the city because he doesn't like it when two men kiss?
    - xg15 6y ago
      > How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? Counter-question: How do you know the flat-earthers aren't actually correct and earth is in fact flat?
    - xg15 6y ago
      > In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified But that's blurring the picture by mixing two orthogonal concerns. Assuming your studies are correct, the pantomime shows are still not effective in preventing terrorism, no matter how much false sense of security they provide. That the false sense of security may have its own positive effect is a different aspect that doesn't have to do anything with the original purpose of the measures or the soundness of the studies. As an analogy, if a startup sucessfully executed a pivot, this doesn't magically redeem their original business case. If someone before the pivot predicted that the startup would fail because of their unconvincing business case then yes, at a high level, their prediction is wrong (the startup did not fail) but the reasons behind their prediction (the original business model was unsustainable) are still valid.
tosser0001 6y ago
I remember Scientific American had an article about what would happen to New Orleans if a hurricane hit several years before Katrina [1]. I recall having a bit of a hard time believing it could really be as bad as they said: surely people would have planned for something like this given its inevitability? Obviously I was wrong. Also, Katerina wasn't even the direct hit that they had modeled so it could have been much, much worse. I still wonder, even in the wake of Katrina, if New Orleans is truly prepared for the storm that is inevitably going to come. [1] paywalled, but this is the link from 2001: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drowning-new-orleans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drowning-new-orle...
- skykooler 6y ago
  I remember reading that article too. When I saw the news about Katrina, I was blown away to learn that nobody had addressed any of the issues yet.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    Isn't being a coastal city below sea level in a hurricane-prone region just a recipe for disaster? It seems like it would take an absurd about of infrastructure to protect the city.
jjcon 6y ago
What do you want them to say? ‘Yeah we really hoped this wouldn’t happen but I guess it did’ It’s not like you can stop a hurricane.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  "We foresaw these issues, took measures to mitigate in advance, and put together plans to deal with the issues we can't prevent entirely." There's a big difference between "you can't stop a hurricane" and "you can't do anything about a hurricane's effects".
jennyyang 6y ago
Anyone can write any story they want in the age of the Internet. It doesn't make them right, it makes them lucky. Look at Peter Schiff. He correctly predicted the housing meltdown, and since then he's been consistently wrong for the last 12 years.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

thaumasiotes 6y ago

Every type of devastation, possible or not, has been "foreseen" by someone out there.

xg15 6y ago
Yes but some are "foreseen" by lunatics and some by empirical science. This is the old "there is no truth, everything is subjective, so according to my alternative facts, I was in the right and everyone else was wrong" spiel again.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  At the end of the day it all comes down to subjective decisions on what predictions are reasonable and what are not.
  - reallydontask 6y ago
    Ultimately you are right, but this is basically Popper vs Kuhn. I can confidently say that the sun will indeed rise tomorrow from the East and set on the West, to pretend otherwise is sheer folly.
    - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
      Yeah you can always dumb it down to prove whatever point you want to prove but decisions like "do we spend a billion bucks building the levy one foot higher to prevent the flood or do we assume the flood will happen and spend a billion bucks on flood mitigation in our building code and emergency preparedness plans" are full of ambiguity and nobody knows the right answer ahead of time.
      - reallydontask 6y ago
        I was dumbing it down to prove that consensus is possible, the same can be achieved on your scenario though the consensus could well be less unanimous, I don't know enough about this area to have an opinion, though I suspect that people would prefer the former to the latter.
      - adamsea 6y ago
        It’s more like spend one hundred million to make the levy higher _and_ on flood mitigation, versus spend a billion (plus maybe lose tons of money due to economic damage) dealing with the effects of the disaster. Prevention is usually cheaper (and TFA in this case says it is).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- CraigJPerry 6y ago
  How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. If we’re only looking at the numbers, that’s a pantomime show. In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    This is why credentialism is pervasive.
  - thomascgalvin 6y ago
    > How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? All over the world people are taking off shoes and belts to get on an airplane. Experts have widely decried airport security procedures as nonsense, including the penetration testers who are charged with proving whether or not these measures are effective. An evidence-based examination has therefore proven these measures are, if not lunacy, at least not practical. Intelligence officers, on the other hand, wrote up detailed explanations of how airplanes could be hijacked and turned into missiles. These people were experts in their field, and their hypotheticals were all reasonable. They were ignored, essentially, because people didn't want to deal with it. When it comes to the dangers posed by hurricanes, it's fairly easy to determine if someone is coming from an evidence-based perspective, or a lunacy-based perspective. Are they engineers? Do they understand weather patterns and hydrology? Are they talking about how likely the events they're talking about are likely to occur over the next five, ten, one-hundred years? Or are they screaming about how God is going to level the city because he doesn't like it when two men kiss?
  - xg15 6y ago
    > How do you split the lunatics from the evidence based? Counter-question: How do you know the flat-earthers aren't actually correct and earth is in fact flat?
  - xg15 6y ago
    > In reality though, pantomime shows have a habit of putting a certain percentage of the population’s mind at rest so they are valuable for that outcome which can’t easily be quantified But that's blurring the picture by mixing two orthogonal concerns. Assuming your studies are correct, the pantomime shows are still not effective in preventing terrorism, no matter how much false sense of security they provide. That the false sense of security may have its own positive effect is a different aspect that doesn't have to do anything with the original purpose of the measures or the soundness of the studies. As an analogy, if a startup sucessfully executed a pivot, this doesn't magically redeem their original business case. If someone before the pivot predicted that the startup would fail because of their unconvincing business case then yes, at a high level, their prediction is wrong (the startup did not fail) but the reasons behind their prediction (the original business model was unsustainable) are still valid.

tosser0001 6y ago

I remember Scientific American had an article about what would happen to New Orleans if a hurricane hit several years before Katrina [1]. I recall having a bit of a hard time believing it could really be as bad as they said: surely people would have planned for something like this given its inevitability? Obviously I was wrong. Also, Katerina wasn't even the direct hit that they had modeled so it could have been much, much worse. I still wonder, even in the wake of Katrina, if New Orleans is truly prepared for the storm that is inevitably going to come. [1] paywalled, but this is the link from 2001: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drowning-new-orleans/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drowning-new-orle...

skykooler 6y ago
I remember reading that article too. When I saw the news about Katrina, I was blown away to learn that nobody had addressed any of the issues yet.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  Isn't being a coastal city below sea level in a hurricane-prone region just a recipe for disaster? It seems like it would take an absurd about of infrastructure to protect the city.

jjcon 6y ago

What do you want them to say? ‘Yeah we really hoped this wouldn’t happen but I guess it did’ It’s not like you can stop a hurricane.

ceejayoz 6y ago
"We foresaw these issues, took measures to mitigate in advance, and put together plans to deal with the issues we can't prevent entirely." There's a big difference between "you can't stop a hurricane" and "you can't do anything about a hurricane's effects".

jennyyang 6y ago

Anyone can write any story they want in the age of the Internet. It doesn't make them right, it makes them lucky. Look at Peter Schiff. He correctly predicted the housing meltdown, and since then he's been consistently wrong for the last 12 years.