"If I were running a national news outlet, one simple idea I’d consider is picking a random local news story to highlight every day. Terrible things happening will bubble up to national news, but success stories, even decidedly nuanced ones like “we spilled acid but then cleaned it up right away,” should have a chance of bubbling up too, for balance. If we celebrate those little successes, we’ll end up putting boring competence in the spotlight as a side effect." PLEASE DO
Preventing stuff by actively looking for potential sources of instability in systems is so much easier and convenient than dealing with the consequences of negligence it's ridiculous. As to the problem of rewarding people for stuff that didn't happen, aside from wonderful articles like this one, I can only think of having computers (or Bay Area Bayesians) trying to constantly calculate publicly available probabilities of incidents such as forests fires or traffic crashes on certain roads so politicians have a number they can brag about having diminished. Goodhart's law considerations apply though.
I'm here via Reddit... this is a great post. I'm a writer and a volunteer firefighter, and the end of Cool Runnings makes me cry, so this post basically ticks every box I have (solid, clever writing, underdog story, elevation of cheerful reason above all, an interesting perspective) and so of course it made me cry (sports-movie style, not... end of Armageddon) I'm really looking forward to more from you. Bravo!
"If I were running a national news outlet, one simple idea I’d consider is picking a random local news story to highlight every day. Terrible things happening will bubble up to national news, but success stories, even decidedly nuanced ones like “we spilled acid but then cleaned it up right away,” should have a chance of bubbling up too, for balance. If we celebrate those little successes, we’ll end up putting boring competence in the spotlight as a side effect." PLEASE DO
Preventing stuff by actively looking for potential sources of instability in systems is so much easier and convenient than dealing with the consequences of negligence it's ridiculous. As to the problem of rewarding people for stuff that didn't happen, aside from wonderful articles like this one, I can only think of having computers (or Bay Area Bayesians) trying to constantly calculate publicly available probabilities of incidents such as forests fires or traffic crashes on certain roads so politicians have a number they can brag about having diminished. Goodhart's law considerations apply though.
I'm here via Reddit... this is a great post. I'm a writer and a volunteer firefighter, and the end of Cool Runnings makes me cry, so this post basically ticks every box I have (solid, clever writing, underdog story, elevation of cheerful reason above all, an interesting perspective) and so of course it made me cry (sports-movie style, not... end of Armageddon) I'm really looking forward to more from you. Bravo!