cosmic gopnik
Bogoed
sorry, but this isn’t anything significant
It’s just a local joke that I wrote in russian a long time ago. Essentially a shortened version of the post, but much more gopnik-esque.
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.
I didn’t even realize Wikipedia had a public list of near-misses. Thank you!
Exactly what I’m looking for
Thank you!
Part of the reason why wrote this is hope that comments will actually yield a list of similar and better texts. I know they’re out there somewhere.
The World Keeps Getting Saved and You Don’t Notice
Hello! I’m wondering if I can translate your book into Russian?
I’m not going to monetize it, and of course I will give the credits.
I don’t see a dichotomy! I think his belief that nothing is happening could have been based on his confidence that other people care about our world.