| What's Up With Me
It has been disheartening to observe the terrible scenes in the evacuation from Afghanistan. Just like so many business leaders greatly underestimated the likelihood of the Delta surge, our political and military and intelligence leaders very much undercounted the strength of the Taliban and the weakness of the Afghan military and government. The normalcy bias, our tendency to seriously underestimate the likelihood and impact of major threats (which the blog and video go into in much more depth), is a powerful and tragic cognitive bias. As we can see, it has life and death implications, whether for the situation in Afghanistan, or the situation in the US with the Delta surge.
We can even see this in the consequences of Hurricane Ida-caused flooding in the US Northeast. Many dozens of people died in large part due to a failure to prepare for the flooding that weather forecasters warned about. Indeed, the National Hurricane Center had warned of the
serious possibility of “significant and life-threatening flash flooding" and major river flooding in the mid-Atlantic region and New England. Yet so much attention had focused on the impact of Ida on the New Orleans area that the residents and officials of the mid-Atlantic region and New England did not pay nearly enough attention to the serious threat posed by Ida to them. It’s a tragedy that could have been avoided if we had more awareness of the normalcy bias and the need to seriously consider warnings of major threats. What would it have cost to prepare better, compared to how many lives were lost due to such failure to prepare?
It’s especially upsetting for me because I grew up in New York City (as did my wife and business partners Agnes Vishnevkin). Our parents and siblings still live there. Her sister’s workplace was flooded, but otherwise they made out fine - luckily so.
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