When you read Taleb you will be depressed that almost none of us can
ever manage to think outside the box. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
On 3/24/2014 5:26 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> 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.
>
--
_________________________________________________________________
Options: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/listinfo/olympus
Archives: http://lists.thomasclausen.net/mailman/private/olympus/
Themed Olympus Photo Exhibition: http://www.tope.nl/
|