My wife was managing two high-profile meetings today and spent a good deal of time last week preparing for exigencies. Double check the room reservation. Allow extra time in the morning. Plan for backup tech support. Check to see how long the laptop can go before the screensaver locks out a critical user and requires re-authentication. And so on.
Meanwhile, my students are designing and building model bridges. As part of this month-long project, they test individual components under load and are told that their final design should include a factor of safety of 2.0. I.e. the design should support twice as much weight as we expect the bridge to actually experience.
If I were Malcolm Gladwell, I would write a book called “Overbuilt,” which would be about the many advantages of…not worst-case-scenario planning, exactly, but bad-case-scenario planning. It would be about the virtues of paranoia. The world throws low-probability events at us all the time: not only is the IT guy sick, but the projector has a burnt-out bulb and the post-it note that had our room reservation on it came unstuck from the monitor and fell to the floor, where it was missed because yada yada.
Planning for such things isn’t just prudent. It’s a shared characteristic of the punctual, the effective, the reliable in every domain. Even in the realm of pure idea, we expect critical thinkers to consider objections to their claims, to anticipate counterarguments, and to systematically eliminate, minimize, or otherwise contain those oppositions.
Our imaginations are rarely as creative as Murphy’s forces. The second law of thermodynamics wants you to fail. To ensure that your project is successful, you need a plan that will work when the shit comes down. And if it doesn’t come down today, it probably will tomorrow.
Thus, one of my favorite mottos: Semper paratus. Always ready.
Would make a good fable for a young skeptic . . .
This resonated with me, I’m using the expression “Zombie Apocalypse” as a descriptor for the kinds of situations where groups of humans are dangerous for some reason, (riot, revolution, food shortage…etc).
I don’t think that the zombie itself is a real threat, since zombies don’t exist. But that doesn’t mean that scenarios less than or equivalent to a zombie apocalypse are not worth preparing for.
Joshua,
I was at a conference you talked at earlier this year, spoke to you and bought your book, If Not God, Then What. I’m reading Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, currently and came across a line that resonates with your book.
Dawkins describes a childhood experience of transcendent feeling about the Universe and mentions a Church of England minister who entered the ministry as the result of similar feelings about God: “Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other is not an easy question to answer,” writes Dawkins.
There you go, eh?
You might find these interesting:
http://www.aisc.org/content.aspx?id=780
This second one is for HS students, but you might find some relevance in it:
http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/
Hey Dustin!
The West Point curriculum was actually exactly what we used. Some people had seen it in HS, but it’s still appropriate for first-term college students — though most physics or engineering people will find it too easy.