Attempts to get the LW community to borrow some of the risk analysis tools that are used to make split second judgments in such communities effectively has been met with a crushing wall of failure and arrogance. Suggestion that LW-ers should take a simple training course at their local volunteer fire department so they can understand low probability high cost risk on an emotional level has been met with outright derision.
As someone who has taken the NIMS/ICS 100 course (online through FEMA), and gone to my local fire station and taken their equivalent of NIMS/ICS 100/200/70 -- I was not very impressed.
I can clearly see that there are valuable things in NIMS/ICS, and I can even believe that the movement which gave rise to the whole thing had valuable, interesting, and novel insights. But you’re not going to get much of that by taking the course. It’s got about one important concept—which basically boils down to “it’s good for different agencies to cooperate effectively, and here’s one structure under which that empirically seems to happen well, therefore let’s all use it”—and the rest is a lot of details and terminology which are critically important to people actually working in said agencies, and mostly irrelevant otherwise.
EDIT: Boromir’s big thing seems to be that HRO is about risk analysis, updating based on evidence, and dealing with low probabilities as mentioned in the excerpt. I can tell you that the basic ICS course covers exactly none of that. So I wonder what ‘training course at the local volunteer fire department’ he thinks we should all take. (I admit I have not taken the FEMA-official ICS 200 and 70 classes, which are online. But given the style of the 100 class, I cannot imagine them being dense with the kind of knowledge he thinks we should be gaining from them.)
Interesting, though apparently this person made his suggestions to Salamon and Yudkowsky in person, not to the LW community itself—thus, his reference to “outright derision” is somewhat misleading. CFAR has indeed adopted some ideas that originally came from LW itself—the whole “goal factoring” theme of recent CFAR workshops seems to be a significant example.
I’m not particularly close to the CFAR wing of that crowd, but: on the one hand, that sounds at least potentially valuable, and I’d look into it if I had anything more specific to go on than “a simple training course”. (Poking around my local fire department’s webpage turned up only something called “Community Emergency Response Training”, which seems to consist of first aid, disaster prep, and basic firefighting—too narrow and skill-based to be what Boromir’s comment is talking about.)
On the other hand, though, I don’t think we’re getting the full story here. The fact that Boromir devotes most of his comment to flogging the organization he’s (judging from his username’s link) either a member or a fanboy of, in particular, is a very bad sign.
From a comment on SSC:
Does anyone close to CFAR know the specifics?
As someone who has taken the NIMS/ICS 100 course (online through FEMA), and gone to my local fire station and taken their equivalent of NIMS/ICS 100/200/70 -- I was not very impressed.
I can clearly see that there are valuable things in NIMS/ICS, and I can even believe that the movement which gave rise to the whole thing had valuable, interesting, and novel insights. But you’re not going to get much of that by taking the course. It’s got about one important concept—which basically boils down to “it’s good for different agencies to cooperate effectively, and here’s one structure under which that empirically seems to happen well, therefore let’s all use it”—and the rest is a lot of details and terminology which are critically important to people actually working in said agencies, and mostly irrelevant otherwise.
EDIT: Boromir’s big thing seems to be that HRO is about risk analysis, updating based on evidence, and dealing with low probabilities as mentioned in the excerpt. I can tell you that the basic ICS course covers exactly none of that. So I wonder what ‘training course at the local volunteer fire department’ he thinks we should all take. (I admit I have not taken the FEMA-official ICS 200 and 70 classes, which are online. But given the style of the 100 class, I cannot imagine them being dense with the kind of knowledge he thinks we should be gaining from them.)
Interesting, though apparently this person made his suggestions to Salamon and Yudkowsky in person, not to the LW community itself—thus, his reference to “outright derision” is somewhat misleading. CFAR has indeed adopted some ideas that originally came from LW itself—the whole “goal factoring” theme of recent CFAR workshops seems to be a significant example.
I’m not particularly close to the CFAR wing of that crowd, but: on the one hand, that sounds at least potentially valuable, and I’d look into it if I had anything more specific to go on than “a simple training course”. (Poking around my local fire department’s webpage turned up only something called “Community Emergency Response Training”, which seems to consist of first aid, disaster prep, and basic firefighting—too narrow and skill-based to be what Boromir’s comment is talking about.)
On the other hand, though, I don’t think we’re getting the full story here. The fact that Boromir devotes most of his comment to flogging the organization he’s (judging from his username’s link) either a member or a fanboy of, in particular, is a very bad sign.