ahbwramc comments on Stupid Questions June 2015 - Less Wrong
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What contingencies should I be planning for in day to day life? HPMOR was big on the whole "be prepared" theme, and while I encounter very few dark wizards and ominous prophecies in my life, it still seems like a good lesson to take to heart. I'd bet there's some low-hanging fruit that I'm missing out on in terms of preparedness. Any suggestions? They don't have to be big things - people always seem to jump to emergencies when talking about being prepared, which I think is both good and bad. Obviously certain emergencies are common enough that the average person is likely to face one at some point in their life, and being prepared for it can have a very high payoff in that case. But there's also a failure mode that people fall into of focusing only on preparing for sexy-but-extremely-low-probability events (I recall a reddit thread that discussed how to survive in case an airplane that you're on breaks up, which...struck me as not the best use of one's planning time). So I'd be just as interested in mundane, everyday tips.
(Note: my motivation for this is almost exclusively "I want to look like a genius in front of my friends when some contingency I planned for comes to pass", which is maybe not the best motivation for doing this kind of thing. But when I find myself with a dumb-sounding motive for doing something I rationally endorse anyway, I try to take advantage of the motive, dumb-sounding or not.)
Thanks for the great suggestions everyone. To follow up, here's what I did as a result of this thread:
-Put batteries back in my smoke detector
-Backed up all of my data (hadn't done this for many months)
-Got a small swiss army knife and put it on my keychain (already been useful)
-Looked at a few fire extinguishers to make sure I knew how to use them
-Put some useful things in my messenger bag (kleenex, pencil and paper) - I'll probably try to keep adding things to my bag as I think of them, since I almost always have it with me
All of the car-related suggestions seemed like good ones, but weren't applicable since I don't own a car. Some other suggestions were good but required more time than I was willing to put in right now, or weren't applicable for other reasons.