I wasn't clear about my post before. I meant to re-write it. But you beat me to the punch.
Things happen in life. Some of then are to our benefit. Some are to our detriment. A lot of the things that happen that are to our detriment, are easily preventable, if we are willing to think about them beforehand, and come up with simple and cheap ways to minimise the harm, or even prevent the situation happening at all. This is called "hazard prevention". In driving, it's called defensive driving, and is how we are taught to drive in the UK, because it eliminates the vast majority of potential accidents, with only a minimal cost to the driver.
When it comes to the future, hazard prevention is just as beneficial. Dale Carnegie pointed out that most of the time, people who are unwilling to consider the worst, usually come off the worst, because if they did, they could easily see ways to prepare ahead of time, so that the future potential hazards can either be minimised with little cost, or can even be prevented from happening at all.
However, there are a lot of young people around today, who have no clue on what to do if things don't get better. They see what's in the media and are terrified. But the media are not telling them how to prepare for potential hazards. So, they want to believe that the future is going to get better and better, because anything terrifies them to the point where they just can't handle even thinking about it. It's a shame, because if they were willing to develop hazard prevention skills, a lot of the problems that are happening today, would never occur, and those that would, would be only a small annoyance, but nothing that we can't handle.
The problem with that post is hindsight bias or sampling bias or both. Yes, it is easier to look back and identify causes of disasters than it is to identify them before the disaster.
Yesterday, my boss was panicking about a virus that stopped many of his clients' businesses from trading. I told him I'd look into it. It didn't take me long to find out that the problem was one of those 1-in-a million cases, that was not realistically predictable, and to even try, would cost far more in time and thus in money, than the cost those problems cause. I told him that there was nothing he could have realistically done, and there was nothing to worry about, and that if any of his clients complained about it, then if he explained the situation, then they'd understand that the cost of prevention would cost them far more than they lost, and they would understand that the most practical thing to do, was to not worry about it.
Second, it only takes into account the times that disaster did happen and none of the times disaster did not happen, which obviously can't really be accounted for. I mean, yeah, any time there is a problem at all there must be causes that happen beforehand. We don't live in a problem free world. And it is impossible to identify problems that didn't happen.
Actually, you can. It's just a matter of assessing what things are likely to happen, how likely they would happen, how much they cost to fix, and how much it would cost to put in measures now to prevent them beforehand.
If you're in business, you have to do such risk assessments to stay in business. If it doesn't happen today, it can and often does happen soon. If you don't, the you go out of business within a few months. Likewise, if you spend all your money on things that probably won't be a big issue, or can't really be stopped anyway, you'll have nothing with which to continue making money.
Which is the same kind of superstition (or at least a related one) that leads my religious neighbor to believe that she knew when someone was about to call her on the phone because she was thinking of them right when they called. She didn't account for the 99 billion times it didn't happen and so attributed high significance to the 1 time it did, which was actually a pretty probable event given how much time there is in a person's life. In other words, you notice the exceptions, but when the rule is followed you don't notice it at all, and so you think the rule is never followed.
I'm surprised she's religious. The vast majority of religious people refuse to accept such things exist, because they believe such premonitions come from the devil. I've met a lot of people who believe in premonitions. The vast majority are not religious in the slightest. The few who are religious, are extremely unconventional. I asked them about the details of their premonitions. They reported that they too had mistrusted it for years. But when they had such premonitions, they were so often accurate, that it was silly to ignore them.
There are of course some who believe in unfounded premonitions. But to do so, when the evidence shows that they don't have such an ability, is a clear case of mental illness. Fortunately, with so many people being openly acknowledged with clear signs of mental illness, we've got a huge amount of data to draw on. What we can see, is that mental ilness in such cognitive failures, happens across the board. A person who thinks they have premonitions just because of one or two cases of coincidence, forms opinions based on very little data. They're the type of person who, upon reading one argument for atheism online, immediately concludes that atheism is the only possibility without ever considering the alternative. They show the same types of jumping to conclusions all the time. If your neighbour is always doing things like telling you and others to keep clear of your friend with glasses becaus she read in the paper yesterday that e a guy with glasses killed someone, then she's batty. But if she doesn't do that sort of thing all the time, then the chances are that she's sane, and that whenever she gets such premonitions, they usually are accurate.
That said, what you are saying kind of helps prove my point (that solutions are better than warnings), not that I think my point is absolute. Sometimes warnings are good.
The purpose of raising warnings without solutions, is to appraise you of potential hazards where you seem to be ignoring the potential for danger, and where you clearly could come up with a solution so easily, that it's not worth mentioning one, or where there are factors in your life that the speaker would probably not know about, that would be vital to developing a solution, making any solution that the speaker could come up with, either useless to you, or even cause you even more problems.
Specifically I think there are certain parties, especially at this forum, who excessively and unproductively dwell on the negative and I believe it is, as I stated, due to a sort of sanctimonious egotism motivated by god knows what. I would not exactly compare them to Winston Churchill. Nor would I compare myself to Winston Churchill, but personally I have recently made threads about the threats I see from Islam, which is my number 1 problem with the world probably, and North Korea. People got all hissy-fitty at me for doing it both times, so whatever I guess, but my point is at least I am not constantly making those sorts of threads and posts as if it is part of the basis for my identity. Basically.
The issues of fundamentalist Islam and North Korea were raised decades ago. A lot of people have put a lot of thought into them already. If Islam poses a serious threat, then it would have been a good idea for us to not invite Muslims to come and study chemistry in Western universities and then go home, because chemistry teaches one how to make IEDs out of household chemicals. If Islam is a serious threat, then it would have been a good idea to not open the doors to immigration and allow millions of Muslims in each Western country. But now it's a done deal. We taught them how to make IDEs and suicide bombs. We've let so many in our countries, that if they did want to take us on, we'd have millions of terrorists and suicide bombers, far more than our police, national guard and armies could handle. Even if they could, we've let so many live so close to us in our cities, that if the police, national guard and army tried to get rid of them, they'd probably end up killing far more of us than them due to collateral damage. Even if we just tried to get them out now, they're so used to living in Western countries, that any attempt to oust them would be seen as some form of eradication comparable to the holocaust, and would cause them all to rise up against us. There are 1.5 billion Muslims right now, and they're in countries in the Middle East and Africa, which we rely on for natural resouces, such as petroleum for our cars and plastics, and precious metals for our computers and smartphones. If we nuked them, we'd end up making all those resources radioactive, and that would force us back to agriculturalism. But we've become so used to technology, that the current generations would probably not cope. Even if they could, our cities would become wastelands. We'd need at least 50-100 years of homelessness living in the rain with no way to make enough antibiotics to keep from a few hundred million from catching pneumonia and TB due to sleeping in the rain. The time to do something about stopping the spread of Islam, is long gone. If we plan now to move back to agriculturalism, then we might be able to set up a plan to move the Muslims back to their home countries in another 50-100 years. But we're not doing anything of the kind. We're going the other way entirely, which is making us more and more dependent on them, and thus giving them more and more power over us.
North Korea has a similar problem. Before they had nukes, the U.S.S.R. and then China were protecting them. If we hadn't opened the door to brining business to China in the 70s, then by the 90s, when the U.S.S.R. fell, we might have stood a chance taking on China. But we were so interested in making money, that we didn't think about the potential hazards. Now that NK has nukes, it's impossible. If even one nuke goes off, every other country that has a nuke will assume that WW3 is happening, and that everyone else will start shelling their nukes, and so they'll shoot their nukes to try to get them before they can get their nukes going. The whole situation is a powderkeg. So we can't afford to launch one at NK anymore, not unless everyone in your country wants to commit suiicide simultaneously.
IMHO, our best hope is to make friends with them as much as possible, and to use what weapons we have, to convince them that to oppose us would lead to us nuking them and thus them also being killed off as well, thus giving them a strong incentive to be friends with us in return.
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