Couple Minutes

I planned a trip to Puerto Rico about a month ago with my girlfriend. Five days off, extending the long weekend to snorkel, hike El Yunque, and take a tropical cocktail-making class. The day of our flight, the island suffered a full blackout. I only found out four hours before our flight was supposed to take off. In fact, I almost missed it: no alerts, no emails, just a stray glance at Bloomberg news.

My immediate reaction was to write it off; how bad could it be? That response was classically system one¹: fast, familiar, and shaped by my own experiences in countries where power outages are supposed to last minutes at most. Still, something in the articles seemed slightly wrong. The airports were still supposedly operational, but no official source had stated a reason for the outages yet and the island had been 100% blacked out for hours.

That prompted me to do more research than I normally would have. I specifically looked for past blackouts and found out that the last time there was a blackout, it actually had lasted for a couple of days.

It was a fairly uncomfortable decision, but after a couple minutes of thinking² I booked a flight for home instead, and immediately began trying to refund our flights, lodging, and activities. I didn’t even know if I could recoup all the financial costs, but decided that a reasonable E[proportion of cost recouped] was 0.8, which I was fine with.

This isn’t meant to be an illuminatory tale. I would think most competent people would make a similar decision, and in retrospect it’s a very easy decision to make. But it’s interesting that it required switching into a very purposeful style of thinking that required conscious effort. I’m sure there are plenty of times when I’ve relied too heavily on wrong intuition, and I intend to start investing a few minutes into questioning my assumptions before making future decisions.