90. The Prepared Practitioner
(Epistemic status: the obligatory EDC post; heavily prescriptive on strong grounds and long experience; check out what's cluttering up my Bag of Holding.) There is maybe one website I will happily link to on this blog, ever, and it is how.complexsystems.fail . It's a favorite; it's pretty much just text with some sourcing for bona fides, and a frame for understanding, well... how it is that complex systems end up failing. It's a shockingly broadly applicable way to think; one of those things where once you start looking, you'll see it everywhere. Traffic and accidents; medical care and iatrogenic ailments (not just hospital-acquired infections but also cutting the wrong leg off); political systems and their dysfunctions (and just how easy it is for a single bad-actor practitioner to ruin a lot); social groups and their collapses; cooking and ruined dishes. And, perhaps most dubiously at first blush, navigating daily life. Listen: I am a fan of the OSHA-coded "d...