Conspiracy theorists tend to mistake incompetence for malice; or partial incompetence for total incompetence. Hurricane Katrina doesn’t invalidate health and building codes; education; law enforcement and EPA, FAA, and SEC regulations. Decisions made are both bad and good, but it’s irrational to think the decision makers are generally untrustworthy.

One of the most glaring flaws of the conspiracy theorists is that they assume authority are bad for bad sake, like they're some mindless evil that does bad thing for .. no apparent reason. Even though the priorities of authority might not be aligned with that of the people, it is still a set of rational priorities, for personal gain etc. Too many conspiracy theorist make no sense because the act they suspect authority do does not make any sense for anybody.

This is why you see so many satanic cult/ritual references I. Conspiracy theories. It helps explain evil for the sake of evil.

It is perfectly rational to distrust decision makers, it makes no difference whether the intent is malicious or it is just incompetence. The end result is the same.

I trust them to be malicious enough to hide their incompetence.

I am working with some, not in a high risk domain at all and I worry the same kind of people work in high risk domains (sometimes they work in both, next election they might move to another minister).

Didn’t all of these agencies come about after some incident happened that was disastrous?

The SEC came about after/during the Great Depression. Building codes stiffened after terrible hurricanes.

Sure, but what’s your point? Decisions _should_ be based on past information. You don’t expect politicians to be clairvoyant do you?

There’s no doubt that politics, especially US politics and government, are pretty screwed up, but it doesn’t automatically follow that anarchy is better.

Some of it works and some of it doesn’t. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

I think you have a point because this fear also creates incentives for scammers to profit from it.

There is a difference in how people "act" on the collective level (administrative bodies and bureaucracies, even companies) and how we respond on the individual level (employees, bread-winners, family members).

There is no serious / open conversation about this inside companies right now - some places I know even discourage you and slap you with the fear-monger label, while hoping it will just blow over. Especially in Tech where we could just send people home right away and work remotely hardly anyone does this (if it hasn't already been policy).

> Decisions _should_ be based on past information.

Making decisions only on past information is what makes Black Swans a scary reality. Maybe good time for us all to re-read Taleb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_...

I feel like there must be some sort of internet law that says, “gross incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

Pretty sure you are kidding, but for the benefit of future readers:

> Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

There’s an obvious corollary:

> If you want to get away with it, make it indistinguishable from incompetence.

Here’s a WWII field manual from “them” on the subject. It actually helped me unlearn some bad behaviors instilled by previous bad management. :-)

http://www.simplesabotage.com/

Related term of art for programmers is underhanded code. Always make your undermining of security and insertion of backdoors to appear to be a simple coding error: http://underhanded-c.org/

But would you say, in a general sense, that it is better to assume malice rather than mistakes/incompetence/stupidity?

If one is responsible for ensuring security, they won't be very effective unless they realize malicious actors masquerading as the incompetent exist and are active.

If I am working on security critical software I don't try to determine the intent of anyone at all, everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

My question was in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

> everyone is assumed malicious and their code/actions reviewed as such.

Yes we are in agreement.

> in a more general sense, do you assume that all mistakes are done on purpose to conceal some sort of plot?

Obviously not and no one is claiming that. The extremes of never assuming malice and never assuming incompetence are ... extremes.

Always starting with a presumption of innocence is said to be a useful premise for a criminal justice system. And always starting with a presumption of malice is a useful premise for security oversight. Not just code but other things like Secret Service details and plane boarding. It's assumed that boxcutter is for hijacking, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that bottle of water is some sort of chemical to be used in making a bomb, so you have to give it up. It's presumed that baby is a secret bomb, so the baby is going to be scanned and inspected. An unrecognized wellwisher rapidly approaching the President on stage at an event is presumed to be an assassin and will be tackled. A car of lost people looking for a wedding location which is approaching a US security checkpoint in Iraq or Afghanistan without slowing down will be machine gunned. A suspicious man, under the influence, who is staggering along down the center of the road in Baltimore who does not follow orders to stop and get on the ground and who instead reaches into his pocket for his id, cell phone, or breath mints, will be shot dead. Malice is the default assumption in a wide variety of security contexts.

It really needs an "... or corruption" appended to the end. ;)

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by a coordination problem"

I find it hard to think of cases of corruption that are not rooted in malice.

Was not kidding and thank you :)

I just assumed because what you wrote fit so well with Hanlon's razor :)

This could easily be an issue of colloquial interpretation barriers, but there is a significant difference between healthy skepticism and a mistrust driven by assuming the other party is always acting in bad faith.

Like I said, this could be a simple misunderstanding of concepts, but there is a percentage of the population who have drifted from a healthy skepticism into paranoidTown where they assume good faith people/humanity are out to get them. This mistrust is causing many of them to fail to apply basic logic in their decision making.

Hopefully your post was advocating for what I would call a healthy skepticism.

> always acting in bad faith.

Not just that, they're always acting in bad faith and most of time even against their own interest! To cause harm to _$you_ specifically because $you're so important.

> there is a percentage of the population who have drifted from a healthy skepticism into paranoidTown where they assume good faith people/humanity are out to get them

And how big is that percentage? I’m starting to believe, sincerely, that views like the one you expressed are more paranoid and driven by fear-mongering than the views described in your comment. I call these people flat eartherers, e.g. those who believe there are many flat earthers all over the place who are a problem.

And yet 99% of the time, the authorities do a great job of running everything here in the west. The 1% of the time they fail, it proves the conspiracy theorists and fear mongers’ point.

Of all the national emergencies in the US since 2000, Katrina, Sandy, Puerto Rico, etc., does anyone know offhand how many were handled properly?

Seems like ~20-40% are handled improperly if not more.

The ones that were properly handled aren't news.

You never heard about the lead poisoning that didn't happen.. but you'll hear about Flint Michigan.

Try counting all the dams that didn't break and, thus, averted catastrophic floods.

Also count the forest fires that didn't happen because of regulation.

When something is declared a national emergency it's typically because society have failed to prepare.

> You never heard about the lead poisoning that didn't happen.. but you'll hear about Flint Michigan.

Not a great example for this point. Cynically, you heard about Flint because journalists rode the hype train for views and clicks, either failing to do research on other communities or failing to promote those stories to the level of hype required to break into the mainstream. They were close to notifying the public of a widespread public infrastructure and health issue, but for whatever reason fell short and became fodder for anti-"fear-mongering" attitudes.

> . . . The Michigan city doesn't even rank among the most dangerous lead hotspots in America . . .

> In all, Reuters found nearly 3,000 areas with recently recorded lead poisoning rates at least double those in Flint during the peak of that city's contamination crisis. And more than 1,100 of these communities had a rate of elevated blood tests at least four times higher.

> . . .

> Like Flint, many of these localities are plagued by legacy lead: crumbling paint, plumbing, or industrial waste left behind. Unlike Flint, many have received little attention or funding to combat poisoning.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-...

Since you're mostly counting hurricanes, here's a list of all category 4+ hurricanes that hit the US, although most were not that strength when they actually made landfall:

* Hurricane Isabel (5, 2003)

* Hurricane Charley (4, 2004)

* Hurricane Ivan (5, 2004)

* Hurricane Dennis (4, 2005)

* Hurricane Katrina (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Rita (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Wilma (5, 2005)

* Hurricane Ike (4, 2008)

* Hurricane Matthew (5, 2014)

* Hurricane Harvey (4, 2017)

* Hurricane Irma (5, 2017)

* Hurricane Maria (5, 2017)

* Hurricane Florence (4, 2018)

* Hurricane Michael (5, 2018)

* Hurricane Dorian (5, 2019)

That's 15 hurricanes. Of these, Katrina and Maria were the only ones where the response was considered botched. That's only 13%.

And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities? I can't think of any aside from Katrina and Maria. But it's when an atypical response is warranted that authorities ability to respond is tested. Based on that metric, the track record is poor.

There's also the concern of incentives. The authorities are incentivized to treat every emergency as requiring nothing over and above the standard response, because statistically this is correct. And so you would not expect the authorities to be able to recognize, or be honest about when an unfolding emergency requires an atypical response.

> And how many of them required anything but the standard response from authorities?

What do you mean by "standard response"? It seems to me that you have a working definition that is less an objective standard and more a subjective, circular definition of "anything that didn't fail."

Take Hurricane Harvey for example. The rain Houston received was record-breaking: ~30" in the course of a day or so, when the previous monthly record was 19". Does that require merely the "standard response"?

What I mean by the "standard response" are actions that are just some variation of: mobilize national guard, provide emergency shelter, distribute emergency rations of food, provide mobile health care, etc, and usually to some reasonably localized geographic location. Basically the sort of responses where simply modeling your response after the previous similar disaster is sufficient. The problem with Katrina and Maria was precisely that the playbook from prior disasters was inadequate either due to the type or scale of problems faced.

> Basically the sort of responses where simply modeling your response after the previous similar disaster is sufficient. The problem with Katrina and Maria was precisely that the playbook from prior disasters was inadequate either due to the type or scale of problems faced.

The Gulf of Mexico is no stranger to hurricanes, and Katrina and Maria don't even top out the strongest hurricanes on the list (that honor goes to Wilma). Hell, Katrina is only the third strongest hurricane of 2005. That's why the response was so heavily criticized: Katrina was essentially the hurricane that New Orleans' levees were designed for, a repeat of Hurricane Betsy a few days shy of 40 years earlier. Even the levee failures should have been scenarios that had been planned for in terms of disaster response.

How much response a hurricane requires depends a lot on building codes and other local regulation.

If it requires a lot of response it's often because of failure to plan/build accordingly.

How many situations don’t become national emergencies because of good management?

In 2020 it's more like 90% of the time, but the point still stands