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Musings Report 2024-47 11-23-24 Blissful Ignorance is Blissfully Deceptive
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Blissful Ignorance is Blissfully Deceptive
In many cases, it's true that ignorance is bliss. It's certainly true for the systems that underpin everyday life: energy, food, water, and the other essentials listed in last week's Musings, The 8 Essentials We Need to Control.
If we know nothing about these systems, it's easy to feel complacently confident in their reliability and stability, as all we have to go on is our experience of interruptions being rare and brief.
Knowing too much ruins the blissful confidence of not knowing. For example, some years ago a reader who works in the gasoline / diesel supply chain that keeps your local gas station stocked with fuel explained that gas stations are never very far from running dry. If any glitch delays any link in the supply chain, stations would quickly run out of fuel.
Knowing this changes one's perception. Where other customers see the tanker truck refilling the service station tanks as mundane and unworthy of notice, I can't help see it as the final leg of a global supply chain that is inherently vulnerable to disruption at many points.
We take it for granted that our electricity, fuel, water, Internet, groceries, etc., will always be fully stocked / fully functional 24/7 as the backdrop of everyday life, freeing us to focus on other things. We take all this for granted for two reasons:
1) that's been our experience our entire lives, and
2) we know somebody somewhere "owns" the maintenance of these systems: if a fallen tree takes down a power line, somebody somewhere owns the removal of the tree and the restoration of the line. Since somebody else owns it, we don't have to think about it.
As I've endeavored to explain in various posts, there are limits on the capabilities of those we count on to maintain our essential systems come what may.
It's against this backdrop of the blissful confidence of not knowing that we read that the tap water in Asheville is finally drinkable again after 55 days of no doubt strenuous effort by those working to restore water service.
From the perspective of blissful ignorance, we might assume the storm that laid waste to the water system was a one-time outlier event that will never happen again in our lifetimes. But this might not be an accurate projection. Hundred-year storms, floods and droughts seem to be occurring every year or two now.
All these essential systems have been optimized for "normal" uneventful life to reduce costs. They are not designed for an increase of massively disruptive events. To take one example of many, spare parts are kept to a minimum to reduce costs. This means that there are only so many transformers, etc., available nationally and regionally, and only so much production capacity available should the stock of transformers be depleted by storm damage.
Furthermore, these production facilities and storage of essential components have been heavily centralized to reduce costs / optimize efficiencies, so one storm can cripple national production.
In other words, should abnormal events deplete the inventory of transformers, the system is not capable of producing new ones at the rate needed to fix what was damaged or lost.. Someone "owning" the maintenance isn't enough to fix what's broken, as the entire supply chain is inadequate.
As I explained in The Catastrophic Consequences of Under-Competence, the competence of those tasked with maintaining essential systems is another limit that's invisible until the system fails. The point here is the staff is competent to handle "normal" events but unprepared to deal with unusual events that are beyond their training and experience.
Automated systems amplify this "missing competence" because once those who designed / coded the automation retire, there's nobody left who truly understands how to do the tasks that were automated or how the automation actually works.
Once this experiential knowledge has been lost, it cannot be recovered by those who only have experience of using the automated system, not modifying it from the ground up. This sets systemically consequential limits on the capacity of those who "own" the maintenance of essential systems to fix what breaks in even "normal" accidents / events.
We can understand this as a narrowing of the band of what's "normal" due to optimization and a narrowing of the experiential capital that is the only real foundation of the kind of deep knowledge needed to deal with crises, as Donald Schon explained in his book The Reflective Practitioner: our experiential knowledge accretes slowly and intuitively, in ways we cannot fully describe.
We can also understand the limits of knowledge gained from "normal" operations as what correspondent Tom D. describes as "getting inside their OODA loop," the feedback-driven response cycle of Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. Those lacking in experience miss what's actually going on (observe), they then select an inappropriate context from their limited menu of contexts (orient), which then drives an inappropriate decision and action, an OODA loop response that then spirals out of control as events race ahead of their ability to respond to the initial fatally flawed observation-orientation-decision-action loop.
The Lahaina fire is a recent example of this dynamic.
Our cultural obsession with safety has an ironic downside that plays into these limits of experiential capital. To limit the risks of harm, we limit exposure to hazards that are the essential learning experiences about the real-world spectrum of danger.
Consider the "safety feature" now mandated into microwave appliances. We were forced to replace the rusted (crapified) Sharp microwave we bought a few years ago, and the instructions for the new Panasonic microwave explains that as a mandated child-safety feature--the idea being to keep a child from opening the microwave immediately and burning themselves by grabbing a hot dish--we first have to push another button to release the door latch.
That a child will quickly catch on that pushing this second button is needed to open the door adds perhaps 2 seconds to the opening, not long enough to cool an overheated dish. This raises the question: how will a child learn the hazards of hot dishes, hot water, etc., without any experience of being scalded?
What's actually beneficial is an awareness of the necessity to introduce experience with hazards in ways that won't prove fatal or crippling. This was foremost in my mind when I was teaching our friends' two young daughters how to ride bicycles in both off-road and city environments.
Lacking any experience with accidents, they were inattentive to the dangers of traffic, waiting in crosswalks until the cars actually stopped, and a myriad of other potentially dangerous situations that are "normal" when riding bicycles on roads shared with vehicles, and off-road on dirt trails--for example, getting spilled off your bike when you hit a rock, sandy spot, etc.
My goal was not just to keep the children safe but to give them sufficiently wide experience of hazards to become safe bike riders in all kinds of terrain. To them, we were just taking long bike rides and exploring new places, and the essential learning was just part of the experience.
Without this kind of experiential learning-by-doing, then teens end up killing themselves because they have no real-world experience-based understanding of risks and hazards. The obsession with "safety" has made us under-competent and less safe.
If circumstances had been altered only slightly, I'd have been killed in a number of accidents, mostly in construction but also in vehicles / equipment, climbing, the ocean, etc. I've suffered life-changing injuries, and been in an auto accident that took my sibling's life. (I was a young teen, not the driver.) In every case, these accidents were "normal," as people are routinely killed in all kinds of accidents, but not "normal" in terms of what we experience in daily life.
As a result, I've learned the hard way to be aware of the risks inherent in a lot of things, from vehicles to motorcycles to bicycles to heights, power tools, iffy situations involving other people, and so on. I summarize this as "understanding that bad things can happen in normal life, including very bad things." People who lack these experiences are naturally inattentive to risks they don't see because they have no experience of them.
Perhaps as a result of these experiences, I don't just see risk in climbing ladders, I see risk in systems that have been made fragile and vulnerable by optimization, automation, centralization and the narrowing of competence and what's considered "normal."
The child whose only experience of riding a bicycle has been restricted to a safe zone without hazards is oblivious to the dangers of cars not stopping in a crosswalk, or the difference between taking a spill, having a cry and realizing you're not really hurt, and getting into a situation where serious injury becomes possible or even likely.
Ignorance is bliss in the sense that it fosters an anxiety-free confidence that all the good things will always be available regardless of what happens. But ignorance is not bliss if it blinds us to risks that are piling up outside our OODA loop.
The 55-day absence of drinkable tap water was two orders of magnitude greater than the "normal" interruption of essential service (5.5 hours). Few households are prepared for even a 5.5 day interruption in essential services. Yet if we consider the systemic weaknesses described above carefully, we have to widen the band of what might happen and prepare for that as a prudent precaution. This was the point of last week's post, The 8 Essentials We Need to Control.
Highlights of the Blog
Anti-Progress, Breakdown, Reset 11/22/24
How Do We Fix the Collapse of Quality? 11/20/24
The Cure for What Ails Us: Market Crash and Mass Defaults 11/18/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Our ti plants are gloriously colorful in their annual flowering.
What's on the Book Shelf
The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1971) Mancur Olson (via Steve R.)
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
There’s another kind of energy under the ground that’s clean, cheap, and plentiful
How Old Is Your Body? Stand On One Leg and Find Out.
In a Malaysian Pop-Up City, Echoes of China’s Housing Crash: Forest City was an audacious $100 billion project by a top Chinese developer. Today, the project is a fraction of what had been planned and the developer is broke.
Breakthrough by William Pao review – the drugs do work
China's second-generation factory owners go digital to combat challenges
France at ‘tipping point’ after shoot-out involving ‘400 gang members’
Psychopathology: Karen Horney’s Humanist View
Behind a Wall of Trees, Archaeologists Discover a Maya City
Shifting $677m from the banks to the people, every year, forever: The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is going to let you change banks with a click.
Foreclosures in China Soar, Threatening to Choke Off Bank Profits: When the housing market was flying high, mortgage defaults were almost nonexistent. But now the legal system is struggling to keep up with evictions.
I'm the only liberal in my family. Here's how I deal with it. -- insightful, works the other way round, too, being the only traditionalist in a family of liberals....
‘Too much grief and no joy’: This couple plans to return to the US after their dream life in France became a ‘nightmare’ -- to paraphrase Robin Williams, "moving to France is God's way of saying you have too much money."
Voyager 1 Just Phoned Home From 24 Billion Kilometers Away On A Transmitter Not Used Since 1981 -- astounding, given the extremely limited memory of the onboard computer....
"Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it." Epictetus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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