Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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The article makes no sense, and stars with a very wrong perspective on things.

This kind of forgetting is normal. It's how things work when time and resources are finite. The only problem here is the belief that you can keep capacity to do something without actively exercising it, and thus the expectation that you can "just" resume doing things after a long break, without paying up a cold-start cost.

But you can't, and there's no reason to be surprised. I bet the Pentagon and the EU weren't. They didn't need those Stingers and shells for decades, didn't expect to need them soon - but they knew they could get them if they really needed them, but it's gonna be costly.

I don't get why people think this is unusual or surprising, or somehow outrageous and proves something about society or "mindsets of elites" - other than positive aspects like adaptability and resilience.

This is true at all scales. Your body and brain optimizes aggressively, too. An individual saying "I need to warm up" or "I need to hit the gym a few times and then I'll be able", or "yes, I can, but I haven't done it for years so I need an hour with a book/documentation..." - all that is exactly the same as EU going "yes we can make artillery shells... though we haven't in a while so we need some time and some millions of EUR to get our supply chain sorted out first".

My thought as well. Imagine the cost if we kept active every production line of every obscure thing we haven't needed in decades. It's unreasonable to think that we should still be able to make these easily. It would hamper development of new things.

> This kind of forgetting is normal

Just as shift in power and the rise and fall of nations is normal.

Yes. Again, this will eventually happen to every one, some way. Of course nations always want to prevent this; it's part of the job of the government. But there's always long tail of very low probability, very destructive threats. You can't possibly safeguard against them. In fact, trying to do so is a sure way to trigger a fall of your nation (or at least your government), by draining your economy dry due to paranoia.

The rational thing is to address a threat proportionally to it's expected damage and probability of occurrence. When war is unlikely, you scale down your defense production; when it becomes more likely, you ramp it up - paying cold-start cost is still much cheaper than paying for ongoing readiness. If your scaling down defense makes it more likely for you to be attacked - well, that's the job of your intelligence and defense departments to track. Nobody said it's a static system - it's a highly dynamic one, that's what makes geopolitics a hard thing.

For that matter, a lot of human civilization has been about identifying things that were normal and making them rare. "Normal" infant mortality of 40%, famines, floods, history being lost, etc.

Anyway, when it comes to "this is normal" I think we should take care to distinguish between interpretations of:

1. "This specific case should not have taken certain people by surprise."

2. "This is a manifestation of a broader phenomenon."

3. "This is natural and therefore cannot or should not be solved." [Naturalistic fallacy.]

In the specific case discussed in the article and comments, I'm advocating for another interpretation:

4a. "If a process is unlikely to be needed any time soon, shutting it down and then paying cold-start costs if and when it's needed again, is better than keeping it going and wasting resources better used elsewhere", and

4b. "There's an infinitely long tail of low-probability problems, and you can't possibly afford to maintain advance readiness for any of them".

Also on the overall sentiment:

4c. "Paying a cold-start cost isn't a penalty or sign of bad planning. It's just a cost."

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