Being rational while sitting in your room browsing the internet is often hard enough, but how about behaving rationally in an emergency? I’ve been in emergencies, or “black swan events”, and I’m willing to admit that I acted much less optimally than I would have predicted.
All schools in the US do fire drills. The first lesson in the SAS Survival Guide is to be prepared. Reducing the likelihood of disaster is one step, but practice and preparedness are just as essential. Not only will you behave more optimally with practice, but a prepared person is much less likely to fall victim to normalcy bias, which is a major cause of death in disasters. It’s why you see safety demonstrations on every flight, why every school has fire drills—because even a simple reminder that a disaster is possible, is enough to increase survival rates. If the disaster is a completely foreign event, a real black swan, people are much more likely to simply freeze and refuse to believe that something so unlikely and abnormal is happening to them.
Be prepared. It doesn’t cost much, and it can save your and other people’s lives.
Being rational while sitting in your room browsing the internet is often hard enough, but how about behaving rationally in an emergency? I’ve been in emergencies, or “black swan events”, and I’m willing to admit that I acted much less optimally than I would have predicted.
All schools in the US do fire drills. The first lesson in the SAS Survival Guide is to be prepared. Reducing the likelihood of disaster is one step, but practice and preparedness are just as essential. Not only will you behave more optimally with practice, but a prepared person is much less likely to fall victim to normalcy bias, which is a major cause of death in disasters. It’s why you see safety demonstrations on every flight, why every school has fire drills—because even a simple reminder that a disaster is possible, is enough to increase survival rates. If the disaster is a completely foreign event, a real black swan, people are much more likely to simply freeze and refuse to believe that something so unlikely and abnormal is happening to them.
Be prepared. It doesn’t cost much, and it can save your and other people’s lives.