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Tragic events like this can be a reminder that the only person responsible for your safety is You. You Cannot rely on "officials" or rules to care more about yo
by skidd0 3y ago
Tragic events like this can be a reminder that the only person responsible for your safety is You. You Cannot rely on "officials" or rules to care more about you than you do. Trust your gut, maintain awareness. Do not be lulled into complacency by safety theatre.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoSee also, physical health, financial planning, life decisions, personal safety, and psychological well-being. Ultimately, the buck stops with the individual, and you can't completely outsource personal responsibility.
- rewmie 3y ago> Trust your gut, maintain awareness. This advice is pretty bad, and reeks of survivorship bias. This "truthiness" approach to safety purposely ignores the countless cases of morons getting themselves killed by intentionally ignoring directions from emergency services.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoDirections from emergency services are sometimes wrong. Let us admit that they are usually right. But not always. Remember that.
- unshavedyak 3y agoAlso worth remembering that frequently the average person has no idea what to do in emergencies and the gut response is frequently wrong, if not terribly wrong.
- omniglottal 3y agoThe police are average people too.
- bell-cot 3y agoGood training makes a huge difference. Ditto experience. Hard to quickly judge: How much applicable good training/experience does the law officer who is giving you directions (in an emergency) have? And ditto for the command structure behind him, which is most likely where the "direct people to go $This way, not $That way" decisions are coming from.
- unshavedyak 3y agoDoctors make mistakes too, they're average people too. Should we go with our gut on medical decisions? At what point does someone stop becoming "average people" for us to think that our gut doesn't outsmart them? Lets not forget that "average people" are commonly barely better than animals in emergency situations. Look at how much training it takes to ensure a building full of people don't trample each other to death in the event of a building emergency. There's a very wide gulf between being ultimately responsible for your own safety and assuming that your immediate, uneducated gut reactions are more informed than professionals with training.
- rewmie 3y ago> The police are average people too. Let's assume you are right, and just presume that a police officer is as useless in an emergency response scenario as your average Joe. Police officers are a part of a regional- and state-wide organization dedicated to respond to emergencies, collect and process information from multiple sources including direct presence in critical areas, and coordinate the efforts of all members. All members, including your hypothetical police officer. Do you really think that your personal ignorance and lack of insight and context and situational awareness is no better than that of the police officer who is integrated in that state-wide organization dedicated to act during these events? Industrial levels of arrogance and presumption are required to think the average Joe knows best on how to act during an emergency than emergency responders on the ground.
- drewcoo 3y agoAnd people who do know what to do in emergencies are trained to do that. Trust training, not your gut.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThe applicability of advice obviously depends on where you are on the knowledge/intelligence bell curve. Blindly following orders makes sense if 1) you are an idiot or 2) your gut agrees and it seems sensible. If you are knowledgeable and you think something is wrong, that should be cause for second-guessing.
- vkou 3y ago> The applicability of advice obviously depends on where you are on the knowledge/intelligence bell curve. The problem is that every single one of us is an idiot at <many subjects>, and in a large number of them, we don't even know that we are idiots.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoThat's certainly a challenge to navigate, but not an excuse to completely throw your intelligence away. If a road sign clearly pointing off a cliff, don't drive off the cliff! If your town is on fire in a sign, possibly outdated, points You Into The Inferno, don't follow it! If there is a safe spot that you have personal knowledge of, go there despite the directions.
- sottol 3y agoIt also leads to disorganization. Imagine everyone cutting around each other and end up blocking the road. Instead of keeping order everyone slowly exiting, a few cutting ahead could cost many others dearly.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoIndeed, there's a balance. If you are in an orderly line to die like a lemming running off a cliff, you should second guess your choices.
- pookha 3y agoA tornado wiped out my town when I was nine. the local authorities never activated the tornado sirens. Killed something like 18 people in a clustered area. the people that died trusted the government to warn them whereas the people who survived took it upon themselves to maintain awareness of their surroundings. Do not put your kids lives in danger because you're offloading that responsibility to bureaucrats. In the case of Maui the Disaster Emergency lead was a crony that got the job for political reasons. He didn't know what he was doing, and just like with my local city, he failed to alert those in the city of the impending doom. Moral of the story is nobody cares about you and your family more than yourself.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 3y ago[flagged]
- notarget137 3y ago[flagged]