Nassim Taleb: How to React to Pandemics (Coronavirus)
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It’s unclear to what level the paper is referring (reduce flights on a global level, between cities in China or people leaving areas where the contagion started)
Here's the bottom line, from the conclusion:
> Together, these observations lead to the necessity of a precautionary approach to current and potential pandemic outbreaks that must include constraining mobility patterns in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the true parameters of the pathogen.
In other words, isolate the infected. This is not new, nor is the idea of today's highly connected world causing diseases to spread faster than in the last century.
Here we have him in typical form. The point of the paper seems to be to argue that we can reduce transmission by reducing contact (obvious), and concludes that we should do this pre-emptively at large scale worldwide (never going to happen, only good for alarmist headlines). This is exactly his formula when treating risk: start with a total platitude (rare events happen), and spin it out through huge over-reach into a headline-grabbing book (black swan! boo!).
The other thing about Taleb is that he's frequently way out over his skis on on the facts. Here, he states that the "selective dominance of increasingly worse pathogens" makes "extinction certain" as if he's stating an undisputed fact. But instead of citing a virology paper, he cites an interesting but not very relevant evolutionary dynamics paper that draws on a particular mathematical model. In fact, the real world is complicated, and if anything virology tells us the opposite: zoonotic viruses tend to become less virulent over time, as the tradeoff between transmission and lethality is optimised. Almost nobody working in the area of virology would agree with the alarmist nonsense that this paper takes as axiomatic.
If anyone is interested in hearing how actual virologists talk about this outbreak, the superb This Week In Virology podcast has just released an episode that dives into this in depth:
To be fair, I agree with his view on the need to have skin in the game and occasionally he has interesting insights like the decisive stubborn minority.
That's not exactly what he says. He doesn't care about whether an event is rare or frequent, but only in combination with its consequences/impact. His main point is that we're not good at assessing the risk/costs of rare but high-impact events, that our statistical and modelling tools are insufficient for that domain too, and thus we tend to be complacent in our decision making about them. He implicitly argues it's not a platitude because we keep getting it wrong on large scales.
Fwiw his best short problem statement may be this essay in Edge.org from ~10yrs ago: https://www.edge.org/conversation/nassim_nicholas_taleb-the-...
Taleb is publicly, deliberately abrasive and annoying. When evaluating his work you have to conscientiously get yourself into a mindset of ignoring the messenger and focusing on the message. Don't let his personality induce bias into your analysis of his work. But at least he's made that easier by providing extensive technical documentation, "The Technical Incerto Vol I & II", in the sidebar of his site linked above.
Put another way, if we were Turkeys our risk analysis would be modelling how much food the farmer is bringing us every day. And we don't know about Thanks Giving.
The only actual purpose of this paper is to advertise Taleb (and his books): Wuhan virus worse than current predictions? He's definitely going to remind people about his "genius" prediction that it could be worse. Turns out to be not such a big deal? Nobody is even going to remember he wrote this.
The new cool of 2020 seems to be is to make things look like journal articles and blog them. I almost wish for the days of peer review.
I have no idea what a "general" or "non native" "precautionary principle" is. I assume a Markov chain suggested it to them.
But if you believe the precautionary principle then you are pretty much anti-science. Anti-Vaxxers are precautionary principle enthusiasts for instance.
You could go all philosophical and say the precautionary principle is a new science, but that just sounds off alarm bells to me.