Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

The point I'm making--although you can't be blamed for having missed it because I didn't realize it until five minutes ago--is compatible with both arguments. No, we can't be expected to engineer for *highly* unlikely events. But quite a few disasters are more like this one:

https://twitter.com/Heardbeast/status/1362868319116685313

Someone failed to engineer for a not-so-unlikely event.

"Very cold weather" in Texas isn't a wild outlier event. It's snowed 94 times in Houston since 1881. This should have been someone's clue that maybe it could happen again.

We--people--tend to be extremely incompetent and accident-prone, and we're running a ton of highly-complex systems that are, basically, beyond our competence. These systems massively improve our quality of life and life expectancy, but when they go wrong ... *disaster.*

And the disaster is bigger than it would have been had the system been less life-improving.

We're also reliant on a lot of luck. (As @YouDrivePoorly pointed out, a CME could undo us. It hasn't been that long since the Carrington Event. 2012? Near-miss.)

"Human incompetence" shouldn't be viewed as an unusual thing, because it really isn't. Nor should bad luck. Rare events cease to be rare when you lengthen the time horizon: sooner or later you get the once-in-a-century storm, the once-in-a-century pandemic,

the once-in-a-century asteroid strike. If you look at each risk individually, you conclude, "It's unlikely that civilization is going to end today." If you look at them in the aggregate, over time, the risk of civilization ending goes way up.

Now, "civilization ending" is not quite as drastic as it sounds; Texas retains the human capital and knowledge that's allowing it quickly to re-electrify and it will soon get the water running again. But Texas was returned to quite a primitive condition--overnight.

And Texans were baffled. They had no idea how to, say, build igloos to keep themselves warm.

We're running a lot of super-complex systems that aren't especially resilient. And we don't have skills required to thrive in a pre-industrial society anymore.

Things are fragile. And many things we think of as "outlier events" are not, actually, all that rare.