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"Preparedness for the outlier" is a type of training that often goes invisible. For example, *lots* of people consider themselves great tripsitters, and they probably are for the majority of trips - but actual preparedness is when they've experienced and are ready to handle more-

Aella

@Aella_Girl

than just the common experiences. A good tripsitter can handle not just the standard trip, but also the occasional insane or rare trip, and this skill difference is hard to see at first glance. What other professions seem easy, but have their value in preparedness for outliers?

7:04 PM · Apr 12, 2020

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I don't know if this is true, but this is sort of my read on therapy. I imagine it's easy for most people to nod and listen and ask basic insightful questions, but the real skill of a therapist is being able to handle this if it turns out to be more serious or extreme.

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I tripsat one guy who completely lost contact with physical reality (kept knocking over furniture and walking into walls), and screamed nonsense at people in his head, and tossed me around because he didn't understand I was a person. It was really scary.

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Rock climbing has a lot of this. Outlier cases: stuck ropes, dropped gear, medical emergencies (much harder to deal with if you’re on the side of a cliff). A common thread here is needing to improvise or do without the resources you’d typically have, like 911

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Don’t know if it seems easy, but being a commercial airline pilot. Hundreds of uneventful flights and then “Miracle on the Hudson.” Imo we tend to praise professionals for the moment they handle an outlier, when maybe it should be for the drilling and preparing for them.

Peasant-Elect, Pay Tree Arch

@paytreearch

Apr 13, 2020

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@Aella_Girl

I would imagine most knowledge-based professions are like this, tbh. Simple problems have simple causes - making them common - and simple solutions. But it takes a lot of understanding to peel back layers of abstractions in order to grapple with the complex ones.

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Pilot. (Maybe "seems easy" is wrong, but the skills you'll need for the modal 97% of plane flights take maybe 40 hours to learn, being able to reliably survive the other 3% another 1500 at least.)