denis_bider2 comments on On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan - Less Wrong
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The pain of a crisis is in having to deal with it in the first place. What you are proposing is to deal with a crisis before it occurs, in order to prepare ourselves better for it. This means incurring the pain upfront even though there is a low probability that the crisis will ever occur. Now multiply this by the number of different crises - New Orleans, after all, is different from Bear Sterns - and we might spend all of our spare time preparing for low-likelihood catastrophes.
Perhaps you'll argue that not everyone needs to prepare, only a few people need to do it on everyone's behalf, but I don't think that's true. Preparedness has to be pervasive, or else we're not prepared.