Dumb as a Rock

Plato's Atlantis

Heuristics That Almost Always Work a new post on Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander is an entertaining story about how confidently predicting "nothing bad will happen" is a wonderful rule for situations where nothing bad almost never happens. But being the way we are, that's the rule we like, so on those rare occasions when something bad does actually happen we tend to get clobbered.

Funny thing about the picture. It showed up with the post on Feedly, but not on the Astral Codex page. I suspect the moral of the story is someday a catastrophe will befall us, but because nothing bad has happened in a very long time, we don't believe it can happen now, to us, which is liable to make that catastrophe even more catastrophic because we won't have prepared.

Some people maintain a large store of food, enough to feed themselves for a year. I think what we need are communal warehouses that keep enough food to feed the community for a year. However, they don't just stock the warehouse and hold it, they managed it like a FIFO queue (First In, First Out). Food is constantly being added at one end, and food that has been there a year is taken out and distributed, so nothing is going to waste. It means all of your food is a year old, and it doesn't work for fresh vegetables and such. But it would eliminate a lot of headaches for everyone involved. Don't know how well it would work in practice. It take someone with more social skills than I have to organize it.