The thing is, people always want something to be done. And politicians want to do something. No matter what kind of action it is, someone knifed a kid on the street, we must ban knives of a certain length. A pilot downs a plane while the other leaves the cockpit - we must mandate two pilots always present. Someone hides explosives in his shoe - we must X-ray all shoes of all passengers forever. Etc.

The human brain can't take the idea that yeah an exceedingly rare thing happened and we're not going to do anything, because rare things do happen sometimes. And the medicine can be worse than the disease. We just accept that yeah, despite best efforts, some pilots will be hostile for whatever mental reasons. Not saying that is what happened in this case, but just saying that IF that happened.

We need more tradeoff thinking, instead of do something! thinking.

I'm seeing exactly this with the Texas floods. People are criticizing them for not installing an expensive warning system. "Do something!"

But they decided that based on the frequency of floods it was not the best place to spend money.

That was a bad decision. They had major problems during the winter of 2021 too. It's all well to talk about tradeoffs but clearly Texas has under prepared for major weather events and it's getting people killed (not to single them out - they're certainly not the only ones). It's not a coincidence that there were 2 catastrophes in 4 years.

Acknowledging tradeoffs doesn't mean there aren't real problems or that something doesn't need to be done, it's only meaningful when comparing different proposed solutions. What is your alternative to the early warning system with better tradeoffs?

> What is your alternative to the early warning system with better tradeoffs?

I know little about this, I'm simply responding to the people who constantly demand that people do something, anything, and insist that all possible actions be taken without consideration to their cost.

The real world is full of tradeoffs, and it's easy in hindsight to say "That was a bad decision", it's not that easy ahead of time.

The 2021 incident is why we know it was a bad decision. They had 4 years of warning. Extreme weather is going to continue becoming more common. Texas is going to continue to face extreme weather. If they don't prepare, people are going to die. It's not really acceptable to say that it's not economical to do something about that, or unnecessary based on outdated flooding models. When there's an urgent problem - yeah, you do have to do something about it. Tradeoffs are useful to decide what we do, not whether.

I think you do your argument a disservice by using that particular example. If you're going to imply some lives were simply uneconomical to save, and when challenged say that you aren't familiar enough with the matter to discuss what else could've been done, it just comes off callous. I'm not left with the impression you don't think the alarm system was necessary because you understand the tradeoffs.

The problem isn't that Texans are valuing their lives too much and insisting on too many safeguards. The problem is that the safeguards are insufficient.

I was deferring to the judgement of the local people.

I was not making my own decision on the tradeoffs.

Also, your implication that the tradeoff is lives is unfair, I don't think that's the tradeoff, rather I think they were expecting that other types of alerts would be sufficient.

You're deploying a recent disaster, that killed scores of people, as evidence that people want something done when it isn't appropriate - and you aren't even willing to take a stance on whether what was done was appropriate? That's pretty weak tea. It really undermines your argument. If you aren't willing to take a stand on that, use a different example. Otherwise you aren't saying anything.

You're calling on people to have more nuanced discussions that include tradeoffs, but you retreat immediately from the implication that we're discussing people's lives. That's trying to have your cake and eat it too. Tradeoffs are about balancing different budgets, and it's not just a monetary budget, one of those is a budget of people's lives.

You're not quite understanding me, and I can see it's because I was not very careful in how I wrote, and that's on me.

But I'm going to let this drop because I would basically have to start over to explain myself, and I don't think there's any useful purpose in doing so.