Back from a visit to my father in law who lived to be 89. On our way home: snow. It is interesting to notice the impact of a fairly common meteo phenomenon to traffic, even on a sunday. Even if predicted, it looks as of everyone is caught by surprise. Listening to the radio almost becomes funny. Over and over the warning is broadcasted. Over and over the conclusion on the radio can be heard: this would have been a serious traffic jam if the snow had occurred on a working day. Interesting to hear the comment over and over: the weather will be bad until monday morning rush hour.
This leads me to the interesting phenomenon of the predictable disaster. We know traffic is going to be awful tomorrow morning. We can all prevent this problem with a simple action (take the train, work at home) but we won’t. There are a lot of explanations to be made for this: ‘prisoners dilemma’ (if others stay home, I can drive without a problem), the fact we get used to traffic jams and take them into account, a serious jam is like an accepted excuse for arriving too late, thus the ‘punishment’ is not very severe, we need to get at work if we like it or not.
I would like to emphasis in this occasion another explanation that could be relevant. Human mind is very subject to the ’stability fallacy’. We feel that the world is a stable place and we tend to believe the current state to be the platform we will stay on. Because our memory is highly contextual, the memories of different states are not as accessible as they could be. We know in a rational way that thinks can be different, but it is hard to really feel it. Therefor we are prown to a kind of misleading feeling that things will not be as bad as expected.
Tags: complexity, predictable disaster, stability