I’m not aware of any such guide, but it’s a good idea. Here are some thoughts on how we might break this down if we ever want to start such a guide:
Problems vs. opportunities: This may or may not be a meaningful distinction. They would seem to be two sides of the same coin, as both are concerned with utility-maximizing in a narrow time-window. I bring it up because it may not be intuitive, and may spark some ideas.
Context: For completeness sake, as you already brought it up. Who might encounter this problem, and under what circumstances?
Problem speed: Again, for completeness sake, as you already brought it up. Are we only interested in “too fast to Google”, or would it be useful to cover a wider range? A problem may be slow enough to Google, but still require certain resources to solve (like a first-aid kit).
Cost to prepare: How much time / space / energy / money will it cost to be(come) prepared? Is it simply a matter of remembering a fact? Does it require training? Does it require ready cash? A first-aid kit? A fire extinguisher? A phone? A camera?
Reward for being prepared: When a given problem occurs, what’s the net difference in outcome between being prepared and not being prepared?
Resources: How would one go about becoming prepared?
Those would be useful aspects to track. People who are generally interested in becoming more prepared could filter by context, start with the low-cost high-reward items and work their way down. Furthermore, it would be useful if each item could be separately discussed and voted up/down by the community.
Yes, definitely. If we want to be really rigorous about this, Context wouldn’t be a mere logical predicate, but a probability mass function of some kind. And we’d want to sort the list by:
costexpected frequency×reward
But it may not be worth the added complexity. At least not right away. :-)
I’m not aware of any such guide, but it’s a good idea. Here are some thoughts on how we might break this down if we ever want to start such a guide:
Problems vs. opportunities: This may or may not be a meaningful distinction. They would seem to be two sides of the same coin, as both are concerned with utility-maximizing in a narrow time-window. I bring it up because it may not be intuitive, and may spark some ideas.
Context: For completeness sake, as you already brought it up. Who might encounter this problem, and under what circumstances?
Problem speed: Again, for completeness sake, as you already brought it up. Are we only interested in “too fast to Google”, or would it be useful to cover a wider range? A problem may be slow enough to Google, but still require certain resources to solve (like a first-aid kit).
Cost to prepare: How much time / space / energy / money will it cost to be(come) prepared? Is it simply a matter of remembering a fact? Does it require training? Does it require ready cash? A first-aid kit? A fire extinguisher? A phone? A camera?
Reward for being prepared: When a given problem occurs, what’s the net difference in outcome between being prepared and not being prepared?
Resources: How would one go about becoming prepared?
Those would be useful aspects to track. People who are generally interested in becoming more prepared could filter by context, start with the low-cost high-reward items and work their way down. Furthermore, it would be useful if each item could be separately discussed and voted up/down by the community.
Thoughts?
Reward is also based on the probability/frequency of the mishap/opportunity, which may be conditional on personal attributes/group membership.
Yes, definitely. If we want to be really rigorous about this, Context wouldn’t be a mere logical predicate, but a probability mass function of some kind. And we’d want to sort the list by:
But it may not be worth the added complexity. At least not right away. :-)