
"Your Supplies Probably Won’t Be Stolen in a Disaster" by jefftk
From LessWrong (Curated & Popular) by LessWrong
April 24, 2026 · 4 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the misconceptions about societal breakdown during disasters and highlights the supportive behaviors of communities in such situations.
When I write about things like storing food or medication in case of disaster, one common response I get is that it doesn't matter: society will break down, and people who are stronger than you will take your stuff. This seemed plausible at first, but it's actually way off. Looking at past disasters, people mostly fall somewhere on a "kind and supportive" to "keep to themselves" spectrum. When there is looting it's typically directed at stores, not homes, and violence is mostly...
People in this episode
Guest: jefftk
Topics covered
- disaster preparedness
- societal behavior
- looting
- community support
- food storage
Keywords
- disaster
- society
- looting
- food storage
- community
- support
- preparedness
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