I'd recommend reading Black Swan by Nick Taleb.
He deals with this in detail, talking about market/economic crashes. His thesis
is that risk management is only concerned with fairly minor, foreseeable risks
that fit within the current experience of the managers.
Smart people are notorious for making bad decisions for a number of reasons -
they develop an arrogance because they have no experience of being wrong…until
they are, sometimes catastrophically. Unforeseen events are unforeseen because
they just don't fit within the paradigm of the decision makers. No-one gets
applause for spending money on avoiding highly unlikely future scenarios, even
if it isn't much, so they don't.
And then it all looks so bloody obvious in hindsight but not at all from the
other side.
I think he mentioned that the terrorist planes scenario was easy to prevent -
but whoever could have suggested reinforcing cockpit doors and implementing
access protocols would have gained no particular kudos from it and would have
had to justify the expense - so they didn't. Or perhaps they did and were voted
down as a doomslinger. Before the event, it simply did not make sense.
Water coming over the Fukushima wall was not imaginable to those engineers -
they'd built a spiffy great big wall higher than any previous tidal wave so
they were quite safe of course. At that point, the location of the back-up
generators made perfect sense.
This is how humans behave - we won't beat it.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.soultheft.com
Author/Publisher:
The SLR Compendium:
revised edition -
http://blur.by/19Hb8or
The TLR Compendium
http://blur.by/1eDpqN7
On 24/03/2014, at 2:11 PM, Moose wrote:
> It seems to me that in both cases, hiring someone smart to simply think about
> bad things not all that unlikely to happen
> and how their effects might be mitigated by simple, fairly inexpensive
> measures could be quite worthwhile - especially
> when designing a nuclear power plant.
>
> The rogue meteorite, the terrorist plane, I agree, unforeseeable. Water
> coming over a sea wall, or down a basement not
> far from or high above the ocean, imaginable.
--
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