deepstash
Beta
Stop Preparing For The Last Disaster
Expect The Unexpected
- Life has a tendency to surprise us, and we will be most likely smacked with something totally unforeseen and unrelated to the last disaster, that one was prepared for.
- A better strategy is to realize that it is inevitable that life will hit us unexpectedly, and to grow and learn from the same.
- Being adaptive, flexible and resilient would increase our adversity quotient, making us strengthen our inner resources, and enrich our experience.
48 SAVES
This is a professional note extracted from an online article.
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:
3
Key Ideas
Succumbing to the Availability Bias
After a particularly stressful event, most people prepare for a repeat of the same challenge they just faced. From the micro level to the macro level, we succumb to the availability bias and get ready to fight a war we’ve already fought.
We learn that one lesson, but we don’t expand that knowledge to other areas. Because we focus on the specific details, we don’t extrapolate what we learn to identifying what we can better do to prepare for adversity in general.
When Disaster Strikes
When a certain disaster or calamity happens, we work towards ensuring that the same calamity can be dealt with in the better way, the next time it happens. The pain or loss that we suffer motivates us to do so.
We forget in our preparation and resource allocation to the ‘last’ disaster, that we have neglected many other things that are more likely to happen.
Expect The Unexpected
- Life has a tendency to surprise us, and we will be most likely smacked with something totally unforeseen and unrelated to the last disaster, that one was prepared for.
- A better strategy is to realize that it is inevitable that life will hit us unexpectedly, and to grow and learn from the same.
- Being adaptive, flexible and resilient would increase our adversity quotient, making us strengthen our inner resources, and enrich our experience.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
Byproducts of Crises
During war times, the common man is least prepared for dealing with the drastic change of circumstances, displacement, loss of life of the self and loved ones, along with injury, loss of property a...
Benefits Of A Crisis
During the peak of World War II, where it was expected that the citizens would go through hell, the opposite happened. People turned out to be more resilient, driven and motivated during the war.
The looming threat of being dead at any time turned out to be beneficial for the mental conditions and toughness for the individuals. Suicides lessened, and social unity and community bonding increased manifold.
At Home With Adversity
- We, as human beings are naturally adaptive to a disaster or crisis, and bad times are improving our morale and strengthening our community spirit.
- Groups of people collaborating, caring for and working with each other, hand in hand, are the ones who are most likely to live through any crisis.
- The necessary conditions that we need to flourish as individuals and as a species, ironically, emerge during bad times.
3 more ideas
Understanding the world through mental models
A few months ago, the world seemed reliable, but now it is changing so fast and has so many unknown dimensions, it can be hard to try and keep up.
Mental models can help us understand the wo...
Compounding
Compounding is exponential growth. We tend to see the immediate linear relationships in the situation, e.g., how one test diagnoses one person.
The compounding effect of that relationship means that increased testing can lead to an exponential decrease in disease transmission because one infected person can infect more than just one person.
Probabilistic thinking
In the absence of enough testing, we need to use probabilistic thinking to make decisions on what actions to take. Reasonable probability will impact your approach to physical distancing if you estimate the likelihood of transmission as being three people out of ten instead of one person out of one thousand.
When you have to make decisions with incomplete information, use inversion: Look at the problem backward. Ask yourself what you could do to make things worse, then avoid doing those things.
4 more ideas
6
Key Ideas
Risk Compensation
Risk protection is normally done to minimize the harm a particular activity can do to us. There are various things we do to reduce our risk, to make ourselves safer.
Behaviour scientists po...
Risk Compensation Effects
- When automobile safety laws were introduced, the drivers started taking more risks while driving, leading to more pedestrian accidents.
- Children (and even adults) take more physical risks while playing a sport with protective gear.
- Safety features like Anti-lock brakes in vehicles ended up increasing the accidents for taxi drivers in Germany
- Child-proof caps on medicine bottles made parents careless about their being opened by kids, including the ones which don’t have the safety feature.
The Carelessness Effect
Having a safety device in place, and armed with the knowledge that we can push the envelope a bit, the appetite for risk increases.
- People who have an emergency fund in place tend to be less careful about their investments.
- People wearing a face-mask in this global pandemic feel like they are safer in crowded places (It’s a face mask, not an Iron Man suit).
3 more ideas