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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

These types of examples aren’t useful though because you can make up any number of them, and make them as extreme as you want.

Risk management, on the other hand, is about determining risks that are reasonably likely, and figuring out contingencies and mitigation strategies.

In your opinion, is it reasonably likely that a fungi that is engineered to kill a specific species of insect (and only those carrying a specific disease) can somehow go out of control and end up killing all insects on the planet? In my opinion, it is not.

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I think there are a number of people waking up to the level of concern that you need to put on unbounded risks. See the popular book, The Black Swan. To throw out these large but improbable risks is taking a large part out of these distributions. Maybe it's not a good idea.

On the other hand, we cannot afford to be paralyzed by concerns about black swans. If we did, nothing would get done.

I don't think the book and others with similar thoughts suggest anything like being paralyzed with fear, so we should be OK here.

I disagree. The often unstated sentiment under such thoughts is always "hmm, this sounds way too crazy, we probably shouldn't do it because it feels too much like 'Playing God'!".

It's a form of concern-trolling: deep down inside you are against something, but don't want to say that openly, so instead you pretend to side with the proponents, but choose to play the role of "concerned citizen" and invent scary scenarios at the extreme ends of the probability spectrum, with the suggestion that "we should probably research this thing more before we try it!"

That's not the underlying reasoning and I have heard very clear arguments. The argument goes something like 'the extremely impactful event has never occurred in the past so our risk assessment is very vulnerable to large magnitude errors'.

What is encouraged is taking actions that have well understood OR bounded risk.

By bringing up "concern-trolling", I am concerned you have given up the fight. By avoiding the direct argument and retreating to this supposed hidden argument, which is much easier to counter, there is not anything left to discuss. Tell me if I am misunderstanding.

Like the number of nuclear meltdowns in a thousand years?

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