[McKayDavis]

Please don't discount the people in Hawaii that experienced this event.

We lived on O'ahu when it happened and the topic still comes up occasionally. At the time, it was quite traumatic for myself, my wife, and our kids. I spoke to a large number of people who were still in a state of shock in the following week. At least one person died of a heart attack.

Errant tweets or text messages like this from positions of authority have the potential to have very real and major effects on people's lives. Don't downplay the power they hold.

[exporectomy]

It's a requirement for life to evaluate sources of information. If you hold rigid beliefs like "all information from official sources is infallible" then you're bound to be wrong sometimes. I'd say the problem was partly Hawaiians not being very good at evaluating information.

[McKayDavis]

On the morning of January 13th, 2018 I was looking at my phone. When at 8:08am, every cell phone in the entire state simultaneously emitted an emergency alert tone and displayed this exact message:

BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

I turned on the radio and FM stations were playing the Emergency Broadcast System's well known emergency tone followed by a computerized voice playing the same message as above on repeat.

When faced with this information, time is of absolute essence. The price of taking your time to doubt things and evaluating the veracity of the information means you're not acting to potentially prevent the immient death of yourself and your family.

In this scenario, you cannot expect people to do anything but take things at face value and seek immediate shelter.

[whatastory]

How else are you to evaluate an emergency alert from the government that disaster is about to strike?

People who think they're "good at evaluating information" and ignore emergency notifications can and do quite often end up dead.

[donw]

I live in Japan, and long ago disabled emergency alerts for earthquakes on my phone... because they trigger whenever somebody closes a door a little too forcefully.

The core rule for any alerting system is to trigger if and only if those-to-be-alerted must take some sort of action. In this case, I was tired, pardon the pun, of being blasted out of a deep slumber at 3am for an earthquake that was so weak I could not feel it.

The only action I needed to take was to try and fall asleep again, which isn't terribly easy after your phone has jacked itself to maximum volume with urgent news of impending doom.

After the fourth time in something like two weeks, that alarm was disabled. It was useless.

Kudos to the designer for the earthquake alarm sound, though. That bit does its job brilliantly -- it instantly grabs your attention without deafening you, and you know exactly what is going on.