# The World Keeps Getting Saved and You Don’t Notice

Nothing groundbreaking, just something people forget constantly, and I’m writing it down so I don’t have to re-explain it from scratch. 

The world does not just ”keep working.” It keeps getting saved.

Y2K was a real problem. Computers really were set up in a way that could have broken our infrastructure, including banking, medical supply chains, etc. It didn’t turn into a disaster because people spent many human lifetimes of working hours fixing it. The collapse did not happen, yes, but it’s not a reason to think less of the people who warned about it — on the contrary. Nothing dramatic happened because they made sure it wouldn’t.

When someone looks back at this and says the problem was “overblown,” they’re doing something weird. They’re looking at a thing that was prevented and concluding it was never real.

Someone on Twitter once asked where the problem of the ozone hole had gone (in bad faith, implying that it — and many other climate problems — never really existed). Hank Green explained it beautifully: you don't hear about it anymore because it's being solved. Scientists explained the problem to everyone and found ways to counter it, countries cooperated, companies changed how they produce things. Thousands of people work for it, and they are winning.

Discussion has died down as we began to feel relatively safe. Now we can pretend that it was never serious.

You see this with AI too, already. There are people who are sure that the alignment problem is exaggerated because chatbots already care about people enough and do not give out bomb recipes. As if that were not a man-made miracle. Somehow people infer that the problem was inconsequential, not that we responded properly this one time.

Humans are wired to notice events, not non-events. People observe the post-intervention world and treat it as the baseline. Prevention is invisible.

Because of that, people who prevent bad outcomes often get treated as though they’ve done nothing, or even as though they were dramatic for worrying. Which is a pretty fucked up reward structure when you think about it.

If you work in safety (of... anything), you'll be told many times that your job is unimportant. Some people find it comforting to think that if someone succeeded, then there was never a real problem to begin with. Some are consciously fighting windmills and assume everyone else must be too. And most people just don’t think about catastrophes, you know, unless.

It’s also psychologically harder to respect routine prevention than cinematic heroics. People love the last-minute save, and they are not taught to clap for scheduled maintenance or tedious work.

But it’s still just wrong.

Most of civilization runs on maintenance and prevention. The world is being saved constantly. The world is actively being saved from something right now. You are held by myriads of careful hands! Rejoice!

Anyway, here are a few of my takeaways:

1.  Panic is not automatically stupid just because the worst didn’t occur. Sometimes the concern is why it didn’t occur.
2.  If someone in your life is doing risk mitigation, safety, governance, testing, regulation, etc., let them know you see it. When someone acts as a knight, accord them a knight’s regard.
3.  And this one feels awkward, because I’m asking you to stop being so humble — if you yourself do that kind of work, yap about it. 
    
    Say out loud what the risk is, tell us what you did about it. Tell us what would have happened if it weren't for you. 
    
    If you don’t, people may eventually assume the danger was imaginary. If enough people assume that, they might stop funding, supporting, or doing the quiet work that keeps the floor from collapsing.
    

P.S. Please, let me know if someone wrote a similar thing better.

P.P.S. Was irritated by NOTHING EVER HAPPENS meme again. Also thought about "myriads of careful hands" -metaphor and liked it.