denis_bider2 comments on On Not Having an Advance Abyssal Plan - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 February 2009 08:20PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (43)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: denis_bider2 26 February 2009 11:11:26PM 0 points [-]

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.