Your analysis of early action + no disaster overlooks the fact that early action can prevent the disaster. But you never see the things that were prevented… because they were prevented. Early action only seems useful when it merely mitigates a disaster — that is, when it is not all that successful. Valiant failure is valorised over competent success.
Y2K is a case in point. There actually was a problem, and it was fixed.
Thanks — I agree that early action can genuinely prevent disasters, and Y2K may well be a case where large-scale remediation averted serious failures. That’s an important distinction, and I’m not trying to deny it.
Instead, I am deliberately mostly overlooking prevention (though I can make that clearer) because the level I’m focusing on in this note is one step down from that system view: what things look like to a reasonably informed non-expert in advance, under uncertainty, before the outcome is known. The reason I am overlooking prevention is because, for the purpose of this text, it would not affect my conclusion. In 1998–1999, it wasn’t obvious to most people outside the remediation teams whether Y2K fixes were sufficient or even well coordinated. Expert assessments diverged, public information was mixed, and there was no way for a layperson to “test” the fix ahead of time. Some people responded to that murky situation by preparing early.
Afterwards, when the rollover produced no visible breakdowns, it became easy to reframe Y2K as a non-event or a clean mitigation success. But foresight and hindsight operate on different information. From the point of view of a typical person in 1999, you couldn’t know whether early preparation would turn out to be prudent or would later look unnecessary — that only becomes clear after the fact. A similar pattern shows up in nuclear brinkmanship: diplomats may succeed in preventing escalation, but families deciding whether to leave Washington or New York during a crisis have to act under incomplete information. They cannot rely on knowing in advance that prevention efforts will succeed.
In that sense, I actually think your point strengthens the mechanism I’m interested in. If someone now looks back at Y2K and sees it as a mitigation success — “the system handled it” — then their lived lesson is still “I waited and it was fine; professionals took care of it.” For many others who barely tracked the details and just remember that nothing bad seemed to happen where they lived, the felt lesson is similar: “I waited and it was fine.” In both cases, doing nothing personally seemed to have worked, regardless of what, if any, beliefs they had about why there was no disaster. In both instances, that is exactly the kind of training signal I’m worried about for future timing decisions.
So I fully agree there can be real, competent prevention at the system level. My claim is about what these episodes teach individuals making timing choices under uncertainty. I’ll make that foresight–hindsight and system–individual distinction clearer in the Y2K section so readers don’t bounce off in the way you describe. Thanks for flagging it — this comment helps me see where the draft was under-explained. And none of my examples are completely clear: The Gunnison example is actual system level prevention, though at a “near-individual-level”. I think this is generally the cases when trying to split actual, messy and complex parts of the world into delineated classes.
Side note: As I discuss in the note, one complication for future decisions is that institutional early-warning capacity may be weakening in some areas, while emerging technologies (especially in bio and AI) could create faster, harder-to-mitigate risks. So even if Y2K was ultimately a case where system-level remediation succeeded, that doesn’t guarantee the same dynamic will hold for future threats. But that’s a separate point from the hindsight/foresight issue you raised here.
Your analysis of early action + no disaster overlooks the fact that early action can prevent the disaster. But you never see the things that were prevented… because they were prevented. Early action only seems useful when it merely mitigates a disaster — that is, when it is not all that successful. Valiant failure is valorised over competent success.
Y2K is a case in point. There actually was a problem, and it was fixed.
Thanks — I agree that early action can genuinely prevent disasters, and Y2K may well be a case where large-scale remediation averted serious failures. That’s an important distinction, and I’m not trying to deny it.
Instead, I am deliberately mostly overlooking prevention (though I can make that clearer) because the level I’m focusing on in this note is one step down from that system view: what things look like to a reasonably informed non-expert in advance, under uncertainty, before the outcome is known. The reason I am overlooking prevention is because, for the purpose of this text, it would not affect my conclusion. In 1998–1999, it wasn’t obvious to most people outside the remediation teams whether Y2K fixes were sufficient or even well coordinated. Expert assessments diverged, public information was mixed, and there was no way for a layperson to “test” the fix ahead of time. Some people responded to that murky situation by preparing early.
Afterwards, when the rollover produced no visible breakdowns, it became easy to reframe Y2K as a non-event or a clean mitigation success. But foresight and hindsight operate on different information. From the point of view of a typical person in 1999, you couldn’t know whether early preparation would turn out to be prudent or would later look unnecessary — that only becomes clear after the fact. A similar pattern shows up in nuclear brinkmanship: diplomats may succeed in preventing escalation, but families deciding whether to leave Washington or New York during a crisis have to act under incomplete information. They cannot rely on knowing in advance that prevention efforts will succeed.
In that sense, I actually think your point strengthens the mechanism I’m interested in. If someone now looks back at Y2K and sees it as a mitigation success — “the system handled it” — then their lived lesson is still “I waited and it was fine; professionals took care of it.” For many others who barely tracked the details and just remember that nothing bad seemed to happen where they lived, the felt lesson is similar: “I waited and it was fine.” In both cases, doing nothing personally seemed to have worked, regardless of what, if any, beliefs they had about why there was no disaster. In both instances, that is exactly the kind of training signal I’m worried about for future timing decisions.
So I fully agree there can be real, competent prevention at the system level. My claim is about what these episodes teach individuals making timing choices under uncertainty. I’ll make that foresight–hindsight and system–individual distinction clearer in the Y2K section so readers don’t bounce off in the way you describe. Thanks for flagging it — this comment helps me see where the draft was under-explained. And none of my examples are completely clear: The Gunnison example is actual system level prevention, though at a “near-individual-level”. I think this is generally the cases when trying to split actual, messy and complex parts of the world into delineated classes.
Side note: As I discuss in the note, one complication for future decisions is that institutional early-warning capacity may be weakening in some areas, while emerging technologies (especially in bio and AI) could create faster, harder-to-mitigate risks. So even if Y2K was ultimately a case where system-level remediation succeeded, that doesn’t guarantee the same dynamic will hold for future threats. But that’s a separate point from the hindsight/foresight issue you raised here.