3 ms·
> In everyday life, I definitely notice that people do not take say, fire alarm seriously and act quickly enough. Don't be a deer caught in the spotlight, forge
by nucleardog 6y ago
> In everyday life, I definitely notice that people do not take say, fire alarm seriously and act quickly enough. Don't be a deer caught in the spotlight, forge your own path and take these things seriously your life may depend on it (even if its 1% chance that that alarm is a real one).
Problem with things like fire alarms is they go off _so_ often, yet are almost never a true alarm.
In my experience, it's not even 1%. I've heard fire alarms tested monthly or quarterly for years. My own smoke detector at home used to go off regularly. I've heard literally hundred of "THE BUILDING IS ON FIRE EVACUATE OH SHIT" alarms, and never once seen even a small fire.
Well, that's a lie, I lit a reasonably-sized oil fire on my stove top one day (left some good scorch marks on the ceiling and stuff). No alarm went off.
Hell, one time the small apartment building I lived in had the building-wide alarm go off which did convince everyone to vacate--probably because it had never gone off before. I ran a roll-call out on the front lawn and accounted for every unit and had every single person reporting that there was no fire in their unit. The only common areas were the hallways people'd just exited through. The fire department cleared it in about two minutes and told us we could re-enter with the alarms blaring.
I'd be surprised to find someone that, through school fire drills, random smoke detectors, testing and malfunctioning of building alarms, etc have not been totally desensitized to these alerts.
If you get an alert every day from your intrusion detection system saying "SOMEONE'S IN YOUR NETWORK STEALING YOUR FILES!" and never once find that to be the case, eventually you're going to start ignoring the alerts.
That said, yes -- if I smell smoke/see fire, if I'm on a boat and water is coming up around my ankles, I'm not gonna just sit there and die because someone says it's okay.
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoIs there a better alternative?
- seanmcdirmid 6y agoThe effectiveness of any information source is only as good as its signal to noise ratio. Given a bad S/N, the alarm system is simply not effective. Reduce the noise.
- johnmaguire2013 6y agoI agree with you. But this is a tricky problem. The alarms go off because there is smoke - the issue is that the smoke is not dangerous. How do you solve for this? You could set a higher threshold for detection, but this also delays any response to the (very dangerous and urgent) problem.
- zaarn 6y agoIt's not my experience with fire alarms that they go off without reason at all. Common for apartment buildings is someone smoking under the detector (more often than you think and often they don't realize it they caused the alarm). I've worked at places that take fire alarms (or chemical hazard alarms) very seriously. If they triggered without proper cause, an investigation was always launched to prevent future false alarms. Because otherwise, hundreds of people can die the one day the alarm goes off for real. They have less than 1 false alert over 5 years. My father is a licensed fire safety advisor and I've taken a course on fire- and sound-safety during my bachelor thesis. When things go wrong here, people get hurt, hence every alarm should be taken seriously and false alarms need to be prevented at any cost. I would also point out, if you're sitting in the passenger cabin and water comes up to your ankles, it is likely to late to run. Same for fire coming from under your apartment door. That's why we have alarms.
- bluGill 6y agoI think people have become sensitized only in a good way: they don't panic. Instead they think another drill, better get out in a clam orderly manor and counted. It helps that there are enough fires every decade that you hear of one just often enough that you think "better safe than sorry". That is my observation anyway.