For the last two weeks, my weather app has informed me that there’s a real risk (in this case, wildfires).
But, after a few days, that’s not severe weather. That’s just weather. (Metaphor alert).
Patterns are easy to ignore. We pay attention when the pattern is interrupted.
The nature of alerts is that they’re not persistent.
The two challenges are:
- We think that regularly alerting people to something is likely to get their attention again and again.
- We’ll get used to severe conditions that we should never get used to.
