Events are already set for catastrophe, they must be steered along some course they would not naturally go. [...] Are you confident in the success of this plan? No, that is the wrong question, we are not limited to a single plan. Are you certain that this plan will be enough, that we need essay no others? Asked in such fashion, the question answers itself. The path leading to disaster must be averted along every possible point of intervention. — Professor Quirrell (competent, despite other issues), HPMOR chapter 92 1. Keeping intervention points in mind 1.1. The vague elephant 1.2. Example: France 1.3. Full-court press 1.4. Multi-stage fal... opportunity! Brief tangent about a conjunction of disjunctions Varied interventions help Sources of correlation indicate deeper intervention points 2. Some takeaways 3. Some biases potentially affecting strategy porfolio balancing 4. A terse opinionated partial list of maybe-underattended points of intervention This post is ...

Some things are sort of intrinsically dynamic, and this can be scary but might have to be confronted. 1. Example 1: Snowboarding I've only been snowboarding twice, but a key lesson I had to learn / unlearn was that doing something more slowly, or in a way that's more stop-safe, is NOT necessarily safer. If there's a steep part of the hill, you have two options: You could go down it with the board facing fairly straight down, which makes you go really fast; Or, you could try to slow down by weaving back and forth. Going straight is scary because it's faster. But weaving is often MORE risky: if you catch the downhill edge of your board on the snow, you flip forward onto your face downhill, which SUCKS. Also, weaving takes more effort on your ankles / legs than going straight, which tires you out and makes it easier for you to lose control and flip. So trying to make it be the case that at any point you COULD stop immediately is NOT necessarily safer. Sometimes it...