10 ms·

The Myth of Panic (2021)

39 points by apsec112 2y ago

aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
nuancebydefault 2y ago
Interesting that Fritz already debunked the myth of panic during WWII, while rather recently, during the last pandemic, governments delayed correctly informing of the crowd, due to that myth. So myths will be myths?
IcyWindows 2y ago
I can believe it. Despite scientists and politicians saying the climate situation is dire, there is no panic.
- lupire 2y ago
  Dire is not immediate.
- lisper 2y ago
  Wait until we have our first planet-wide crop failure.
  - guenthert 2y ago
    Unlikely to happen any time soon as the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones (just different ones than now). And it won't take a planet-wide crop failure, just a wide-spread one or other major disruption. Arguably we (or rather the poorer nations in Africa) came close, when Ukraine found it difficult to ship their harvest.
    - lisper 2y ago
      > the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones Yes, but large-scale crop production is not so easy to move. > it won't take a planet-wide crop failure Yes, by "planet-wide crop failure" I didn't mean that there won't be a harvest anywhere, just that production will drop low enough that there is no more surplus. I'm pretty sure that will be enough to destabilize our geopolitics, and it will be all downhill from there for quite a while.
- scottLobster 2y ago
  I panicked for a few months, as a naive college student in my early 20s, then I realized there was no stopping it and decided to position my family as best as possible to live through it. But if you have nothing better to do than panic, then by all means do so. At some point I might be able to market you a product based on that panic, which will be a few more dollars toward building my family's ark.
  - astrange 2y ago
    > then I realized there was no stopping it This is not what the IPCC reports say and so there is no reason to believe it. (For one thing there is no "it" to stop because it's a continuous value you can reduce, and for another we are reducing it. And no, we're not just exporting it to China.)
    - toast0 2y ago
      As an individual, there's not much one can do to spur collective action on climate change. Taking action to mitigate the personal impact is reasonable though; things like picking housing that's unlikely to flood during extreme weather.
      - astrange 2y ago
        I think this is the opposite of correct. The most impact we can have is by improving transportation patterns, which come from improving local land use, which in the US are controlled by city council meetings that only retired busybodies show up to. So show up to them and join a YIMBY chapter, or become a traffic engineer or something. On the other hand, you have no actual personal impact on it unless you own a private plane, so there is nothing to mitigate. Recycling isn't going to help. Or you could try emitting silicon dioxide into the atmosphere and hope nobody stops you. We're probably just going to solve it that way anyway.
        toast0 2y ago
        Not mitigating climate change personally. Mitigating the effects of climate change personally. So, choosing not to live in a house that's right on a low bank shore... Because it's likely to flood and disrupt your life. Be sure to have defensable space around your home, because wildfires are happening in more places. Consider access to drinking water and how to shelter your home from heat.
hash872 2y ago
He leaves out examples that contradict his thesis, like the 1977 New York blackout which lead to widespread arson and looting. (1) Plus similar widespread rioting in Montreal in the 60s when the police went on strike. (2) Wiki also suggested a page for 'list of incidents of civil unrest in the US', which appear to number in the hundreds. (3) My guess would be that whether your city 'panics' or not just depends on a bunch of different circumstances, and that there's no one conveniently pat answer. I used to follow Tanner on Twitter and he seems like a nice guy, but he's definitely part of this new generation of self-appointed 'intellectuals' that got famous on social media, have no actual subject-matter expertise in any 1 field, and just handwave stuff. He is the director of what's apparently a 1 man think thank, and he supposedly 'focuses on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia' despite having no graduate degrees or military/intelligence record that I'm aware of. (Also has nothing to do with this piece). Again, nice guy who I'm sure means well, but basically a self-appointed Twitter 'expert'. Call me old-fashioned but I'd like to see my experts have some actual qualifications in something 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...
- lupire 2y ago
  Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency. Civil unrest is not the same as panic.
  - astrange 2y ago
    You can tell from France that French people just naturally like rioting. (Americans have a highly mythologized idea of protesting based on misunderstanding the Civil Rights movement, so they think that 1. all protesters have strong morally correct political causes and 2. protesting does something good for those causes, and therefore think the French are noble workers fighting for their rights here. In fact they don't accomplish anything, the government just ignores them and are never voted out for this, and they're mostly advocating for wild conspiracy theories anyway.)
WalterBright 2y ago
The bombings of London during WW1 and WW2, and the Allied bombings, were attempts to cause panic among the civilians and thus the countries to collapse. It never happened. Although the V1 attacks did not cause panic and caused little damage, they were cheap to make and fire, and caused the British to divert enormous resources to stop them - resources that were not brought to bear on Germany. On the other hand, while the V2 attacks also did little damage and caused no panic, they were terrifically expensive for the Germans to make, and was a huge diversion of their resources. Since there was no defense against them, they did not divert Allied resources away from attacking Germany.
- AlbertCory 2y ago
  The "defense" against V2 attacks was to conquer the areas from which they came. Which was what the armies in France were going to do anyway. They were a blow to morale, since the Brits were sick of war by then and thought it was almost over. I don't think any of the city bombings in WW2 caused "panic."
WalterBright 2y ago
Isn't it amusing that censorship is there to protect the morals of civilians, yet the censors are not corrupted by viewing it?
Terr_ 2y ago
Submitted for consideration: Perhaps situations when the populace "panics" and does something stupid are usually also the times you couldn't have kept it secret anyway.
Animats 2y ago
From the article: "If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged." "Further, the high morale and solidarity that citizens exhibit during a disaster dissolve the individualist outlook that elites have long learned to control and maintain. The seemingly positive and prosocial solidarity response of the population is itself a threat to the mechanisms of elite power in our society. Just as disasters empower normal citizens on the ground, who have no choice but to take fate into their own hands, they leave elites feeling distant and helpless. Chess and Clarke call this state of affairs “elite panic:” a fearful distrust of the populace that prompts leaders to restrict information, over-concentrate resources, and use coercive methods to reassert authority in the face of temporary breakdowns in public order. This style of response poses an active danger to disaster survivors and, ironically, creates the very resistance to authority that leaders fear most." A similar view comes from, of all people, the CEO of Waffle House. Waffle House prides itself on staying open through disasters. This is formal policy; they have emergency plans, supplies, and equipment. Waffle House does not use computer systems to transmit orders between order counter and kitchen, and that's on purpose. The Waffle House CEO says that if you can keep the Waffle House, the CVS, and the WalMart up, communities will start to recover from a disaster by themselves. This is a good goal. One worth bearing in mind given the other discussion today about cyber attacks. Entire fast food chains should not go down because they can't communicate with HQ.

39 points by apsec112 2y ago

[dead]

Interesting that Fritz already debunked the myth of panic during WWII, while rather recently, during the last pandemic, governments delayed correctly informing of the crowd, due to that myth. So myths will be myths?

IcyWindows 2y ago

I can believe it. Despite scientists and politicians saying the climate situation is dire, there is no panic.

lupire 2y ago
Dire is not immediate.
lisper 2y ago
Wait until we have our first planet-wide crop failure.
- guenthert 2y ago
  Unlikely to happen any time soon as the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones (just different ones than now). And it won't take a planet-wide crop failure, just a wide-spread one or other major disruption. Arguably we (or rather the poorer nations in Africa) came close, when Ukraine found it difficult to ship their harvest.
  - lisper 2y ago
    > the planet will continue to have multiple climate zones Yes, but large-scale crop production is not so easy to move. > it won't take a planet-wide crop failure Yes, by "planet-wide crop failure" I didn't mean that there won't be a harvest anywhere, just that production will drop low enough that there is no more surplus. I'm pretty sure that will be enough to destabilize our geopolitics, and it will be all downhill from there for quite a while.
scottLobster 2y ago
I panicked for a few months, as a naive college student in my early 20s, then I realized there was no stopping it and decided to position my family as best as possible to live through it. But if you have nothing better to do than panic, then by all means do so. At some point I might be able to market you a product based on that panic, which will be a few more dollars toward building my family's ark.
- astrange 2y ago
  > then I realized there was no stopping it This is not what the IPCC reports say and so there is no reason to believe it. (For one thing there is no "it" to stop because it's a continuous value you can reduce, and for another we are reducing it. And no, we're not just exporting it to China.)
  - toast0 2y ago
    As an individual, there's not much one can do to spur collective action on climate change. Taking action to mitigate the personal impact is reasonable though; things like picking housing that's unlikely to flood during extreme weather.
    - astrange 2y ago
      I think this is the opposite of correct. The most impact we can have is by improving transportation patterns, which come from improving local land use, which in the US are controlled by city council meetings that only retired busybodies show up to. So show up to them and join a YIMBY chapter, or become a traffic engineer or something. On the other hand, you have no actual personal impact on it unless you own a private plane, so there is nothing to mitigate. Recycling isn't going to help. Or you could try emitting silicon dioxide into the atmosphere and hope nobody stops you. We're probably just going to solve it that way anyway.
      - toast0 2y ago
        Not mitigating climate change personally. Mitigating the effects of climate change personally. So, choosing not to live in a house that's right on a low bank shore... Because it's likely to flood and disrupt your life. Be sure to have defensable space around your home, because wildfires are happening in more places. Consider access to drinking water and how to shelter your home from heat.

hash872 2y ago

He leaves out examples that contradict his thesis, like the 1977 New York blackout which lead to widespread arson and looting. (1) Plus similar widespread rioting in Montreal in the 60s when the police went on strike. (2) Wiki also suggested a page for 'list of incidents of civil unrest in the US', which appear to number in the hundreds. (3) My guess would be that whether your city 'panics' or not just depends on a bunch of different circumstances, and that there's no one conveniently pat answer. I used to follow Tanner on Twitter and he seems like a nice guy, but he's definitely part of this new generation of self-appointed 'intellectuals' that got famous on social media, have no actual subject-matter expertise in any 1 field, and just handwave stuff. He is the director of what's apparently a 1 man think thank, and he supposedly 'focuses on contemporary security issues in the Asia-Pacific and the military history of East and Southeast Asia' despite having no graduate degrees or military/intelligence record that I'm aware of. (Also has nothing to do with this piece). Again, nice guy who I'm sure means well, but basically a self-appointed Twitter 'expert'. Call me old-fashioned but I'd like to see my experts have some actual qualifications in something 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unrest_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...

lupire 2y ago
Your Montreal example is off base. That riot was a planned attack as part of a year long civil war in Quebec, not a night of panic caused by a sudden emergency. Civil unrest is not the same as panic.
- astrange 2y ago
  You can tell from France that French people just naturally like rioting. (Americans have a highly mythologized idea of protesting based on misunderstanding the Civil Rights movement, so they think that 1. all protesters have strong morally correct political causes and 2. protesting does something good for those causes, and therefore think the French are noble workers fighting for their rights here. In fact they don't accomplish anything, the government just ignores them and are never voted out for this, and they're mostly advocating for wild conspiracy theories anyway.)

WalterBright 2y ago

The bombings of London during WW1 and WW2, and the Allied bombings, were attempts to cause panic among the civilians and thus the countries to collapse. It never happened. Although the V1 attacks did not cause panic and caused little damage, they were cheap to make and fire, and caused the British to divert enormous resources to stop them - resources that were not brought to bear on Germany. On the other hand, while the V2 attacks also did little damage and caused no panic, they were terrifically expensive for the Germans to make, and was a huge diversion of their resources. Since there was no defense against them, they did not divert Allied resources away from attacking Germany.

AlbertCory 2y ago
The "defense" against V2 attacks was to conquer the areas from which they came. Which was what the armies in France were going to do anyway. They were a blow to morale, since the Brits were sick of war by then and thought it was almost over. I don't think any of the city bombings in WW2 caused "panic."

WalterBright 2y ago

Isn't it amusing that censorship is there to protect the morals of civilians, yet the censors are not corrupted by viewing it?

Terr_ 2y ago

Submitted for consideration: Perhaps situations when the populace "panics" and does something stupid are usually also the times you couldn't have kept it secret anyway.

Animats 2y ago

From the article: "If any aspect of an unfolding disaster is marked by panic, disaster sociologists Caron Chess and Lee Clarke observe, it is the behavior of elites. Catastrophe presents a leadership class with a terrible contradiction. On the one hand, the perception that leadership is not equal to the unfolding calamity erodes the legitimacy of any ruling class. Leaders understand that Heaven’s Mandate rests on their effective prevention of and response to crisis. On the other hand, the chaos inherent to disaster inevitably reduces leadership’s ability to control—or even stay aware of—the events by which they will be judged." "Further, the high morale and solidarity that citizens exhibit during a disaster dissolve the individualist outlook that elites have long learned to control and maintain. The seemingly positive and prosocial solidarity response of the population is itself a threat to the mechanisms of elite power in our society. Just as disasters empower normal citizens on the ground, who have no choice but to take fate into their own hands, they leave elites feeling distant and helpless. Chess and Clarke call this state of affairs “elite panic:” a fearful distrust of the populace that prompts leaders to restrict information, over-concentrate resources, and use coercive methods to reassert authority in the face of temporary breakdowns in public order. This style of response poses an active danger to disaster survivors and, ironically, creates the very resistance to authority that leaders fear most." A similar view comes from, of all people, the CEO of Waffle House. Waffle House prides itself on staying open through disasters. This is formal policy; they have emergency plans, supplies, and equipment. Waffle House does not use computer systems to transmit orders between order counter and kitchen, and that's on purpose. The Waffle House CEO says that if you can keep the Waffle House, the CVS, and the WalMart up, communities will start to recover from a disaster by themselves. This is a good goal. One worth bearing in mind given the other discussion today about cyber attacks. Entire fast food chains should not go down because they can't communicate with HQ.