Any disaster we see coming with plenty of advance notice gets fixed.
IIRC, there was pretty good advanced warning about 9/11, but the information was spread out among various organizations. So it depends on what one means by “advanced warning”. I guess I’m unsatisfied with this quote since it seems to be a fully general counterargument for planning for any potential disaster.
I work for the government, so I’ve read and been briefed on a lot of horror stories about impending acquisition/engineering disasters that were vaguely “known”, but were marched into full steam because the overall culture was unaware of biases like sunk cost; think of the Obamacare website. Let’s just say that its rollout with all of its bugs was not a surprise to me.
As someone who is familiar with Adams’ writing, when he talks about his law its pretty clear that he is using a definition of known that doesn’t include either of the scenarios you mentioned. Unfortunately, this review doesn’t include his standard examples and other clarifications.
IIRC, there was pretty good advanced warning about 9/11, but the information was spread out among various organizations. So it depends on what one means by “advanced warning”. I guess I’m unsatisfied with this quote since it seems to be a fully general counterargument for planning for any potential disaster.
I work for the government, so I’ve read and been briefed on a lot of horror stories about impending acquisition/engineering disasters that were vaguely “known”, but were marched into full steam because the overall culture was unaware of biases like sunk cost; think of the Obamacare website. Let’s just say that its rollout with all of its bugs was not a surprise to me.
As someone who is familiar with Adams’ writing, when he talks about his law its pretty clear that he is using a definition of known that doesn’t include either of the scenarios you mentioned. Unfortunately, this review doesn’t include his standard examples and other clarifications.