Conor here: This story would appear to have legs.
In the US at least our elite are embracing recklessness on all fronts—public health, wars, global warming, and even at the “high-reliability” organizations mentioned in following piece. Nuclear safety tules are being gutted, and aviation and air traffic control are in a tailspin. Even disasters aren’t enough to change course anymore as a February vote in Congress showed. From the AP:
The House failed to approve a bill Tuesday that was crafted after last year’s tragic midair collision near Washington, D.C., to require all aircraft flying around busy airports to have key locator systems to prevent such crashes. The collision of an airliner and an Army helicopter killed 67 people in January 2025.
By Brodie Ramin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine at L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa. He practices family medicine, HIV primary care, and addiction medicine, and teaches on prevention science, addiction medicine, exercise and health. His book The Age of Fentanyl was shortlisted for the Donner Prize. His latest book is Written in Blood: Lessons on Prevention from a Risky World. Originally published at The Conversation.
You are driving fast, maybe too fast, on a highway at night. Maybe it’s snowing, or raining, or your eyes are glazing over as you feel the fatigue of a long day set in, or maybe your phone dings and you look down for an instant. Suddenly the car in from of you stops and you hit the brakes. You feel your tires skid and for a second, you are sure you have crashed.
But then: Nothing.
You stopped just in time. Heart pounding, you exhale. You are shaken but also impressed by your speedy reflexes. You think to yourself: No harm done.
But harm nearly done. And that’s the problem.
Near-misses like this often disappear from our minds as fast as they happen. But they are the most valuable safety information we have. People, organizations and societies often fail to prevent disasters, not for lack of warnings, but because they don’t take near misses seriously.
Safety scientist James Reason saw near misses as “immunizations” for a safety system, chances to detect and fix underlying vulnerabilities before real harm occurs. But too often, we waste these chances. We get lucky, and instead of investigating or analyzing what went wrong, we move on.
My interest in near-misses comes from practising medicine and from my research into the history of disasters and system failures, work that informed my book Written in Blood. Studying accidents across fields, from fires to transportation to health care, shows that warning signs are often visible long before catastrophe strikes.
Luck Is Not a Strategy
Take something as mundane as your phone. In late 2025, Apple released iOS 26.1, a routine software update. Except it wasn’t routine. It patched multiple critical vulnerabilities that could have allowed attackers to seize control of iPhones. Had hackers succeeded, millions of users’ data and privacy could have been compromised. And while some phones probably had been hacked, for most people, the crisis was avoided.
In health care, near-misses are common: A medication nearly given to the wrong patient but caught in time, or a surgical tool counted incorrectly but found before the patient’s incision is closed. These are serious signals, but too often they go unreported. The majority of health-care workers fail to report near misses due to fear of blame, lack of feedback or the false belief that no harm means no problem.
Often, staff in health care don’t even realize a near-miss has occurred. If we’re not looking for near-misses, we are nearly guaranteed not to learn from them.
Transportation shows the same pattern. Near-collisions on icy highways. Trains braking just before overshooting a signal. Aircraft diverting after onboard systems detect a mechanical fault mid-flight. In aviation and rail, these close calls are treated as data. In many other sectors, they are dismissed as background noise. But the data is there.
A recent Canadian Automobile Association (CAA) study found that at just 20 monitored intersections, more than 610,000 “near-miss” incidents — close calls between vehicles and pedestrians or cyclists — were recorded from September 2024 to February 2025.
Our systems are sending signals. Every time we get lucky is a chance to learn — a chance to build better layers of defence; a chance to prevent the next tragedy. Near-misses aren’t false alarms. They’re the most honest feedback a system gives: The future, whispering in the present.
Our Brains Aren’t Wired for Prevention
So why don’t we learn from close calls?
Psychologists have long understood the human brain is terrible at processing invisible risks. We overreact to dramatic events but underreact to near-misses. We confuse luck with safety. And we discount what “almost” happened.
Three psychological traps are especially pernicious:
- Availability bias: We remember big disasters, but not the hundreds of times catastrophe was narrowly averted. This skews our risk radar.
- Confirmation bias: We assume a system is safe because it didn’t fail. But many systems survive not because they’re strong, but because nothing has lined up to break them — yet.
- Optimism bias: We know bad things happen to other people but assume our skill or luck will protect us.
Reason’s “Swiss cheese” model describes how disasters happen when weaknesses in multiple layers of defence align. A near miss is when they almost line up and something, often by chance, blocks the path. But unless we plug those holes, the next time, we might not be so lucky.
There are exceptions. Aviation, nuclear energy and air traffic control, so-called “high-reliability organizations,” understand this. Ideally, they treat every close call as a data point. They institutionalize reporting. They never forget to be afraid.
These organizations cultivate a chronic unease, a kind of productive paranoia. It’s not pessimism; it’s realism. They know that systems often drift toward failure unless they’re constantly corrected. That mindset is why they’re among the safest sectors in the world.
Imagine if we brought that mindset to more sectors — if every phishing text that almost fooled someone became a reason to upgrade security, if every minor medical error was reviewed like a crash. The price of ignoring near-misses is always paid eventually — in insurance claims, infrastructure failures, lawsuits and preventable grief.
What You Can Do Now
If near-misses are warning flares, the simplest step is to stop ignoring them. When something almost goes wrong, the instinct is often to shrug it off as luck. But luck is data. It is evidence that a system came close to failing.
The real lesson of near-misses is that they allow us to learn without paying the full price of disaster. Aviation, nuclear power and other high-risk industries have built entire safety systems around studying these moments.
We should treat them the same way in everyday life: on the road, at home and at work. Notice them. Talk about them. Fix the conditions that made them possible.
Because the goal is not simply to avoid disaster. The goal is to learn from the moments when things almost go wrong.
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“The human brain is terrible at processing invisible risk”
Thanks Conor, I guess this answers the question concerning why we only learn our lessons the hard way.
Important post. I work in aviation and participate in a number of high risk hobbies where cultivating this mindset is critical to survival. Ten years ago I climbed Forbidden Peak in Washington’s North Cascades, which is widely recognized as a relatively easy climb with an extremely dangerous descent that requires many low angle rappels back down a knife edge ridge.
On this descent, I consistently failed to tie safety knots on the rappels that I set up. Luckily enough, my partner managed to catch this every time, and we made it down uneventfully.
A couple of years later the Seattle Mountaineers club, during a group climb of this mountain, experienced a fatal accident when the climb’s leader rappelled off the end of the rope and plummeted to her death. Since then I have had a couple of gym friends suffer life altering injuries from rappelling off the end of their ropes.
Healthy paranoia begins with the frank admission that it can happen to me and proceeds to ask, endlessly, what can I do about that?
I used to climb. Always brought a mylar blanket in case I had any doubt about fatigue vs. descent. I’d have rather died of exposure than fall. Now I just hike and bike. Safer, mostly (until I get run over).
I’ve been a serious bicycle commuter at three different eras in my life, and I wish things were aligned for a fourth era given the price of gas about to explode. Toured around the Olympic Peninsula, the coast, Eastern Oregon.
I will not ride to the end of the block without a rearview mirror, specifically one that mounts on my helmet. It is uncanny how much situational awareness one of them bestows on you.
Let me suggest you also wear a lightweight, brightly colored hunters vest when you bicycle. I wear one. Why? Because I believe in Murphys Law.
Beyond the “elite” Conor, but the fact that they are gutting systems where safety-first was unquestioned, no doubt they’re signaling their priorities– profits over people. I’m a firm believer of “monkey-see, monkey-do” and “a fish rots from its head.” I think most of us can come up with examples of these, where self-interested management or principals put the safety and well-being of others into jeopardy with hardly a care but for perhaps some lip-service. And beyond these, I can hardly be the only one who notices so much recklessness on the roads these days as many of our fellow motorists carelessly careen about amuck.
I do agree with the author, and believe that near-misses literally offer another chance so long as we learn from these and don’t blow it.
The funny thing about them declining to improve air travel safety though is that the elite fly far more air miles than the general population. Statistically they are far more likely to be in an air traffic accident.
My guess is that most of the “elite” don’t even know where their money is at any given time. They (or their agents) are just switching investments around to (say) maximize rate of return. They don’t realize that this leads to under-investment in boring things like safety that don’t make an obvious profit.
There’s plenty potentially left on the cutting room floor here … :) but still much appreciated. How these biases tie into media consent manufacturing is probably the deeper dive awaiting here. Our brains are surreptitiously (re)wired by by mass media consumption. If I were to suggest three ills that spring forth from this rewiring, they would be:
Politics As Sport – the masses can’t think critically, because the very serious choices about governance basically boil down to the same blasé approach as picking a sports team. See “eeny-meenie-mynie-moe voter” (via msnow.com).
Cognitive Dissonance – Subsequent to the “team picking”, it doesn’t matter what “my team” actually does from a “good v bad” perspective. When my team does it, it’s somewhere between “I don’t care as much” and “it’s fine”. See “kids in cages” (via cuny.edu).
Goldfish Brain – Very few care about prior mistakes. To wit: how many times can the average USian get lied into a war without vowing to “support the troops” or drinking the “Russia/China/Iran/Whoever is bad, and need to be bombed” narrative?! See every war since Vietnam.
Probably relates to a fear of mortality. Eventually, something terminal happens to everyone, and every society and institution, and that is not an easy concept, especially in the modern consumer-driven society. That said, religion – belief in a guiding angel for example – can also cause the same effect you describe.
I believe that humans are lazier than we realize. Many major mistakes can be explained by the sentiment, “We knew we should have done it, but it was too much trouble.”
That’s my experience with attemping to enforce things like checklists or talking through a process out loud (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_and_calling).
Another obstacle is confidence, and questioning that confidence gets a defensive response or gets treated as an insult.
The classic case of obliviousness to near misses is the Columbia disaster. Repeated partial burn-throughs of chilled o-rings caused Thiokol to RECLASSIFY them as benign.
“Normalization of deviance” was the term used in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle exlosion. NASA got used to the O-rings getting partially burnt through instead of treating them as a red alert.
Hello everyone. As someone who cares about precise language (and the truth that it tries — some of us hope — to convey), “near-misses” is a terrible word. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know how it’s gained the currency it has, but how about we say “near-hits” to describe collisions / accidents / attacks that almost happened, but didn’t?
Also, I don’t and won’t use a smartphone and connect with the internet only via VPN on an open source non-corporate controlled operating system and browser. For the record — since I don’t need Friends™ — I think anyone who uses a smartphone who isn’t a paranoid tech genius is a total idiot.
Re near-misses:
When I worked in the Canadian labour movement I was responsible for coordinating the union side in a health and safety conference in the pulp and paper industry for a few years.
The union’s health and safety committees, one in each local union, took very close account of near-misses and included them in demands to the employer for improvements in working conditions. Today’s near miss is somebody’s arm or leg permanently mangled tomorrow.
The tough stance on health and safety was among the reasons the rank and file membership trusted and strongly supported the union.
It’s not a bubble because it hasn’t burst.
Don’t forget Motorcyclist Bias:
“A miss is as good as a mile.”
Being the only attitude that will get you back on the beast after so many encounters with blind cage drivers. Probably a sub-variant of bias #3…
I’m currently reading Quinn Slobodian’s “Globalists.” He has some fantastic observations about the creation of neoliberalism by Hayek, Mises, Robbins, Ropke, Friedman, etc. One of those takes pits Dominium, the realm of property, economics and markets, against Imperium, the realm of people, culture and society. Two vastly different systems that require two vastly different systems of governance. What makes neoliberalism so radically dangerous is the neoliberal’s foundational belief that in order for the realm of Dominium to operate efficiently, it must not be restrained by the laws of Imperium. Imperium is governed politically by political systems through the rule of law; and Dominium is governed by the market, where absolute security in property rights, complete freedom of economic action, including the freedom to exploit all natural resources and people, and complete freedom of trade are constrained only by the laws of supply and demand, as communicated by the price system, and competition between economic actors.
We are living in a neoliberal world, where Imperium is being restrained to act against Dominium; which makes the failed Congressional vote on airline safety, and the failure of many other attempts by Imperium to restrain Dominium, a foregone conclusion.
Combine this neoliberal governance structure with the biases inherent in human threat detection, and you have a perfect storm. It’s not that we don’t know how to protect against these highly dangerous problems. We do. It’s that the human intelligence and capability to fix these problems is being sidelined so that the neoliberal’s god of the market can operate at peak efficiency.
Had a near-hit a few years ago skiing in Mammoth, was cruising down to a chair lift doing about 40 mph when a straight lining (you don’t make any turns resulting in a ton of speed) snowboarder crossed a foot in front of my skis doing about 55 mph.
I don’t think the boarder ever saw me as he was coming from my right and they have a horrible blind spot as his back was to me when the collision almost occurred.
A few feet separated me from serious injury or death, and I think about it a lot.
So, we elect Trump the first time and almost lose the Capitol to a mob … so we elect him a second time. We ignore the near miss to provide us with a genuine catastrophe. Hmm, makes sense.