To think most serious incidents are preceded by warning signs?

[WryJadeWren]

I don’t mean that everything bad is predictable or that people are to blame for not spotting things. But I’ve been thinking about how often, in hindsight, major incidents - accidents, conflicts, breakdowns, even crises, seem to have earlier warning signs that were minimised, normalised or ignored at the time.
Sometimes those signs only make sense looking back and sometimes they’re uncomfortable to act on.

AIBU to think we’re often taught to downplay early signals rather than take them seriously?

True and I definitely think hindsight bias plays a huge role. I just think there’s a balance between not becoming paranoid/hypervigilant
and not dismissing discomfort or concerns too quickly either. Because sometimes people do later realise they talked themselves out of taking something seriously.

Have you listened the Cautionary Tales podcast, OP? It's fascinating- about historical and modern disasters/crimes/tragedies and the things that led up to them. Not as bleak as it sounds, honest! V much about what you are describing.

Speaking as a former H&S person, something like 98% of what we call 'accidents' are preventable. But you've got to be able to identify and communicate the issue and then you also have to want to do something about it, and be able to afford to do so.

I haven’t but that genuinely sounds right up my street haha. The whole “small ignored signals/patterns leading up to major outcomes” thing is exactly what I was trying to articulate.

And YY the effect where you look back and say "Ah we should have seen the signs!" is also highly likely to be clouded by hindsight. There's something relating to police witness statements which relates to this - if you tell a witness that someone was killed in a car accident before they give their statement, they are highly likely to recall it being much more violent and dramatic than it was and to attribute more malicious action to the driver. There is a similar effect even with minor changes in wording such as referring to a "collision" vs a "smash". It's one reason why in high profile cases reporting is often limited in order to avoid the jury coming in with pre-trial bias.

It's also like the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, where you notice something more because it's relevant to you. Like you get pregnant (or can't get pregnant) and suddenly everyone you know and their dog seems to be pregnant, whereas they weren't before. In reality the rate of pregnancy around you has absolutely nothing to do with your own pregnancy or difficulties conceiving and could not possibly be influenced by that. But you notice it much more keenly when it is something emotionally significant. It's likely that people around you were pregnant at roughly the same rate previously, but you didn't notice. And this probably happens in hindsight where someone turns out to be a predator. It makes you recall every time you noticed them being slightly creepy, whereas you probably notice people being creepy all the time and then later feel that it was a misunderstanding or just a bad day for them or whatever.

We know that the same event, interaction or even something like a facial expression can be experienced completely differently by two people who have been in a different mood or primed differently beforehand. In fact this is one of the ways some antidepressants help lift mood - they don't directly make you happier, but they shift your perception so that rather than think "My colleague thinks I'm an idiot" or "My neighbour hates me" or "That person is judging my fashion sense" you might experience the same interaction as "My colleague is being a patronising git again" or "My neighbour is quiet this morning" or just not even notice the stranger walking past who did not smile. The cumulative effect of not feeling people are out to get you constantly helps with mood. But it is one way that shows we tend to interpret things differently based on our own mood or pre-existing bias about a person.

And in fact something else we know about the brain is that we tend to rationalise decisions after we make them, which is odd because it feels like we do it the other way around, but actually we don't. We know that because of studies on epilepsy patients where the brain has been divided into two halves. You can show the one half a reasoning and let the person make a decision which is obviously highly biased by the reasoning, but then get them to write out why they made that decision with the hand controlled by the other half of the brain, and they will confidently make up a nonsense reason.

The thing is that if you did react to every possible niggle or worry, there would be a lot of false alarms. Which sometimes is OK but sometimes it is disruptive and it could even border on paranoid. Someone with an anxiety disorder or OCD for example might be experiencing an overactive internal alarm system, and actually needs to learn to ignore a lot of the "warning signs".

But I also think we are very bad as humans at making judgement calls about risk and probability. People overestimate certain risks massively (e.g. threads from people worrying they are definitely going to contract food poisoning from an out of date yoghurt) and underestimate other risks massively (e.g. chance of pregnancy when using condom, vaccine hesitancy) - granted these might not be the exact same people. But I think risk and probability is something that is actually fairly difficult for us to process and I find it a really fascinating topic.

Predictably Irrational is another good book which touches on some of these themes. (Would love other book recommendations if anyone has them, especially if there are some which relate to this idea of risk and probability understanding).

Fascinating Horror / Plainly Difficult on youtube are also good.

My sister lives a 'regret-free' life. That includes things like pulling over and knocking on a door to let a parent know their 2/3 year old child is on the windowsill upstairs at bedtime waving at her while she's sitting in traffic because said window is one that can be opened fully.
She can't bear the notion of having seen something potentially dangerous and not doing anything.

It makes her life much more painful but helps her sleep better at night.

That's all really interesting BertieBotts.

The Black Swan book covers unexpected risks and our lack of ability to deal with them.

I definitely think that most accidents/events do have warning signs or could be predicted. The difficulty is working out whether trying to prevent them is going to cause more harm than benefits. And which things are so serious they should always be acted on.

That does sound good, thank you.

Yes you raise a good point about how preventing incidents could cause harm in itself. Like the discussions about the harm/benefits of the COVID lockdowns, particularly for children. I don't think that was clear cut at all, but plenty of other things could be. For example preventing all car travel would massively reduce the amount of road traffic deaths, but would grind the functioning of the country to a halt and cause massive harm.

Some things can be planned for at a National, Regional or local level. It is likely that there will be pandemics and very serious transmissible diseases. The UK was badly prepared in some ways for Covid. However we had then and have now centres for people with confirmed cases or potentially fatal diseases such as Hantavirus.

It is predicted that there will be serious crashes with multiple casualties or fires at a factory at some point so regional emergency services plan for such events, an area with a few large factories likely to concentrate on that a city maybe a different even. All hospitals and different police know and practice.

Some things like the tragedy at Grenfell Tower was foreseen with residents, fire brigade and fire inspectors being ignored. Some of it is about power, the residents had no way to force the landlord to improve things.

However for many things there is no true hindsight that could be useful because although if you Google almost any symptom it will say it might be a rare cancer or deadly you can’t live your life treating every cough or blocked nose like that. That does mean that for a few people blocked nose will have been a sign of a very rare cancer rather than repeated non serious illness.