What I meant to point at was more like “ozone hole wasn’t real” kind of reaction, where by saying “overblown” people imply that the problem was completely made up. I’m not tying to make a point about whether the response scale matched the risk, and I don’t really have the expertise to judge.
Asking how exactly the counterfactual world would have looked like is absolutely reasonable, and honestly it’s a much harder question than the one I was trying to talk about. My focus was only that the full scale of possible consequences is counterfactual to us and therefore invisible.
Btw I belive that in principle it can be estimated. Major industries currently have risk assessment systems in place, nothing stops us from using them to analyze past near-misses. And regarding Y2K specifically: we actually dohave examples of software failures cascading through infrastructure—I was thinking specifically about the 2024 CrowdStrike thing while writing it.
That one’s on me for the phrasing.
What I meant to point at was more like “ozone hole wasn’t real” kind of reaction, where by saying “overblown” people imply that the problem was completely made up. I’m not tying to make a point about whether the response scale matched the risk, and I don’t really have the expertise to judge.
Asking how exactly the counterfactual world would have looked like is absolutely reasonable, and honestly it’s a much harder question than the one I was trying to talk about. My focus was only that the full scale of possible consequences is counterfactual to us and therefore invisible.
Btw I belive that in principle it can be estimated. Major industries currently have risk assessment systems in place, nothing stops us from using them to analyze past near-misses. And regarding Y2K specifically: we actually do have examples of software failures cascading through infrastructure—I was thinking specifically about the 2024 CrowdStrike thing while writing it.