Greg's Blog

The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why by Amanda Ripley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a pretty interesting book with lots of case studies about how people behave during disasters; Ripley clearly did a lot of research! I thought it got a little less interesting as it went, but I still learned a lot and would recommend it!

One of the major things I learned is that in disasters, the popular conception is that people will panic. This is true in some cases (although a lot of crowds won’t tolerate irrational panic behavior), but it’s actually more common for people to sort of freeze up and become quiet and docile. (a theory is that this is evolved behavior for prey that maybe predators won’t want to eat you if it looks like you’re weak or sick!) I think just knowing this may help, but if you’re in a disaster and you do have your wits about you, you can try to help people snap out of this state by doing something drastic like yelling at them. (pg 14)

Another big thing (that I was mostly aware of) is that realistic drills save lives. Because of the above effect, the more thinking one has to do to get to a safe place, the less likely that is to happen. But if you’ve been in a realistic fire drill and know which stairwell to go to, etc, this is much easier to overcome. In my mind this is similar to what airline pilots do when faced with an emergency – for certain extreme situations there are memory items that they have to have memorized that are a short series of steps for what to do. And they’re required to practice them in the simulator every so often to boot, so when something scary happens and the adrenaline is flowing, they can fall back on the few steps they need to do to keep things from getting out of control. (I say “in my mind” because I’m not an airline pilot, I just read a lot about aviation!) (pg 287-296)

Other interesting parts:
– In most disasters, most rescues are done by ordinary people and not first responders. I was a bit surprised by this, but it makes sense; it takes times for first responders to get to a site and undoubtedly there are some people there already. (pg xxix)
– Ripley defines the “survival arc” as having three phases: denial, deliberation, and the decisive moment (and structured the book around these) (pg xxxvii)
– The evacuation after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a fiasco; there were still people in the building ten hours after the explosion! (pg 4)
– The number of people in the World Trade Center on 9/11 was artificially low because it was the same day as the New York City mayoral election and it was the first day of school and the visiting platform (and the New York Stock Exchange, which was relevant to the many stock traders who worked there) doesn’t open until 9:30. The evacuation on 9/11 was also slow (although not as bad as in 1993), and the estimate is that if the building was full five times as many people would have been killed. (pg 13)
– When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the victims were disproportionately old. Of course, being old does make it harder to evacuate, but Ripley’s claim is that this is more due to the fact that older people had been through storms before that weren’t so catastrophic and didn’t take it seriously enough. (a survey after the fact of people who didn’t evacuate showed that around half could have found a way to if they had really wanted to) (pg 34)
– Ripley has an “equation” for what kinds of things we fear; something like “Risk = Probability * Consequence * Dread/Optimism”, and “Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness” (pg 41)
– I had read this before, but it’s still striking that the reduced amount of air travel and corresponding increase in driving in the two years after 9/11 killed ~2300 Americans. Our brains are just not very good at risk! (pg 42)
– People in extreme situations often feel like time is slowing down for them. But a careful study revealed that they can’t actually read a special digital watch that displays numbers faster than normal; instead, the theory is that trauma makes such an impression on your brain that your memories are “recorded” in such a detailed way that it feels like slow motion. (pg 113)
– During Hurricane Katrina, the Coast Guard rescued thirty-four thousand people without waiting for orders from anyone! (pg 287)


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Danger and Other Unknown Risks by Ryan North

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


All else being equal, I’m not a big fan of graphic novels – I often find it hard to tell what’s going on. I’m not sure if I’m just bad at it, or if I get impatient and don’t spend enough time looking at the pictures.

Anyway, for about the first third of this book I only had a vague idea what was going on and was very much not invested. Thankfully, after that something clicked and I really enjoyed the rest of it!


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Do Aliens Speak Physics?: And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality by Daniel Whiteson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


An interesting book that points out that the traditional ideas of how to communicate with aliens (just start with prime numbers and work your way up!) may not work because aliens may think so differently than we do. I started the book not terribly convinced about this but by the end I was willing to concede that the authors had a point.

Having said that, I felt like the book was too long, and a lot of the jokes seemed pretty tacked on. (maybe I was just in a grumpy mood though!)


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