The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks

WP:

"Based on the [Taleb]'s criteria:

    1 The event is a surprise (to the observer).

    2 The event has a major effect.

    3 After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected [...]"

Here's Talebs essay for those without the book: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fc4/ed36e247194c9c0b7adfec...

On the other hand, I think it's good that someone like Taleb now goes around and pokes all the policymakers and governments that nothing of this was unpredictable and Corona is a white swan event.

Anyway, I would agree a black swan needs a very low chance of happening, but not that it has to be the first time it has ever happened.

Certainly when the Europeans saw the black swan in Australia it was the first time they had seen one, but probably not the first time they had seen a variation of a species in a non-European location that looked slightly different than expected.

on edit: some clarifications.

It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.

Indeed.There are countries that reacted better than others, but that didn't make the problem go away: it was still a major disruption to the economy and a major health problem causing some people to die. The magnitude of those problems is affected by competence (and luck), but it's not one of those things where if you play by the book you're just going to be fine.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3322916/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92448/

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

I'm saying it was not utterly predictable in the course of its spread. The extent of the spread would have surprised most people, including epidemiologists if you asked them in January - precisely because we have encountered very similar viruses before and managed to contain them - it was always a possibility, but was considered by most of the world a remote one. Indeed, epidemiologists and governments in many countries knew about the virus in February, but not all reacted appropriately as they'd seen many such warnings before and for previous viruses it was contained and not a risk.

There's swine flu in humans in multiple locations in China at the moment and it is likely to evolve to jump human to human - are you personally preparing for it to spread in the US now? If not why not since its spread is, like coronavirus, inevitable?

Human stupidity also lends itself to retrospective reframing of events as inevitable and easily predictable when they are neither - it's easy to say everyone knew what was coming when talking in retrospect and very hard to accurately asses risk or probability.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave

If this had been done early on, it would’ve been easy to time outbreaks, and we could’ve had more targeted lockdowns.

- A key part of the financial crisis is that, collectively the group of auditors and risk evaluators and experts who are supposed to understand/evaluate/quantify risk, generally failed to properly price in the risk of mortgage-backed securities failing en masse (they basically said, the chance of this happening is astronomically low, and were wrong by many orders of magnitude). Taleb's point was that, for certain events, it is surprisingly difficult to accurately assess their true probability, and even very advanced, highly-paid experts (with a strong vested interest in getting it right), can fail (and fail spectacularly). One of the lessons here is, to not place too much mis-placed confidence in certain kinds of estimates, and to be skeptical of gambling on certain probabilities which are fundamentally non-verifiable or hard to verify (even though they might look like regular probabilities and come packaged with lots of nice documentation and fancy equations and backed by lots of PhDs who tell you how wonderful their models are... we still need to be skeptical). When the weatherman tells you there's a 40% chance of rain, you can be sure that even though he might be wrong, he is very unlikely to be wrong by orders of magnitude (i.e. that the actual chance of rain is 4% or 0.004% or 100%); when a quant at an investment bank tells you that a AAA-rated MBS will fail with probability 0.00001%, you probably shouldn't trust that number in the same way, even though both are probabilities and both come with models and equations to support them.

- With COVID-19 and pandemics in general, it's not clear that the relevant public health experts failed to price in the risk or to accurately estimate/approximate the risk. What seems more likely is that our governments and businesses failed to heed their advice (i.e. that pandemics are inevitable, that they will happen with some regularity e.g. every 10-30 years, that in a globally connected world they will spread more rapidly than ever, etc.), and failed to act on the advice they were given (or in the case of the US, almost literally threw out the pandemic response handbook and ignored it). This makes it less of a "black swan" problem, and more of a regular (though still spectacular) failure of governance.

I might argue however that, there is perhaps a general tendency to incorrectly categorize such things as "black swan" events, which is an interesting phenomenon in and of its own (i.e. why do people want to take white swans and paint them black or to simply pretend as if they were black when they are not).

... hindsight is 20/20. Nobody was suggesting travel restrictions in January.

They do if not maintained, especially when there are major changes in population size or spatial distribution, or changes in the infrastructure and its usage (e.g. hospital spinups and closures, traffic/transport).

To make it worse, Trump outright gutted the pandemic response team, and Germany hasn't done well in that regard either although we were quick to listen on experts, which mitigated that at least a bit.

> A few calm generations in the flood valley don’t quite explain this.

They do, actually. In the US, but also in parts of the EU, "science denial" has been moved from "whacko nutjob" territory to outright mainstream, with constant cuts in education funding doing the rest. Democracy requires a demos, especially a demos able (both intellectually and in terms of time) and willing to participate in the democratic process, to work.

That last word is the problem: there are many people, without a drop of sarcasm, irony, or smiling, who think government should indeed be run like a business.

A public information campaign on why that’s not the case certainly seems important to greatly reduce this idea’s popularity. Are there any groups doing this?

Real life example:

"The Japanese mayor who was laughed at for building a huge sea wall - until his village was left almost untouched by tsunami"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/The-Japanes...

But that mayor was (he died long before the tsunami), I'd think, a rare person.

It's fundamentally an irrational system which uses emotion and political leverage - with a bit of innovation - to maximise short-term individual gain.

But it has surrounded itself with a self-serving cloud of rhetoric about how it's "efficient" and "rational", when in fact it's astoundingly bad at dealing with planet-scale collective threats that could be easily handled with genuinely rational management.

In a healthy capitalist system, you'd have enough competition to make this less of an issue. But healthy competition has been obliterated by our (politically condoned) race for short-term gains through economies of scale, and by the development of incorporation (hundreds of years ago by now, yet the conflicts with other social constructs like freedom of speech and capitalism have never really been addressed).

Any exact number is of course by definition flawed, but it's hard to imagine a stable capitalist system existing without much more vigorous competition - any firm with enough market share to significantly influence standards or think more about retaining users (i.e. lock-in) than about the competition is a problem; and much of our economy is made up of firms like that. At which size does that happen? Anything exceeding 1% market share?

Without sufficient variation and choice, the underlying dynamics (of capitalism) just don't work. In essence, we don't live in a classical capitalism with market forces converging on efficient solutions; but rather in an business or political world where barriers to entry and network effects form moats around inflexible fiefdoms in our society.

This isn't a problem that's easy to solve, because economies of scale work, and even if society at large would benefit from more dynamism, self-interest pulls individuals into corporations that are large enough to undermine competition. Furthermore, the rules we've invented surrounding incorporation strongly encourage this behavior, because it's a way to limit personal risk, and because a conceptual organization can choose to be many formal organizations, it's a way to for corporations to avoid bearing the costs of risks more generally than individuals can. Additionally, basic things like trademarks, patents and copyrights work in favor of centralization - and while I'm sure there are alternatives to those concepts, they're really deeply embedded in society, support well-connected vested interest with strong lobbies, have broad popular support, and in any case have a useful purpose too - replacing such concepts is essentially a non-starter, even if it would be beneficial in the long run.

So at best we can hope for reforms to increase resilience - those would be useful not just in catastrophic situations, but also to increase the effectiveness of capitalism in general. Reforms should limit the kind of exclusive control intellectual property offers (such that it's less suitable as a weapon to knock out competitors, and more suitable to earn income from those you cannot control yet use your innovations). We should have much stricter antitrust regulations, with fewer exceptions allowing large sizes (i.e. the default assumption should be that significant market share is harmful, and place the burden of proof the other way around to the way it is now) and smaller size limits before rules kick in. And we should reevalute the kind of protections corporations benefit from that do make sense for individuals; and perhaps to what extent incorporation can be used to shield owners from risks to encourage subsidiary-jungles less (or simply have a small tax on incorporation itself, much like individuals pay income tax - but on overall value, not profit, such that it's costly to have tons of layers of incorporation).

Say Pandemic response preparation costs $10 billion a year, and the event occurs every hundred years. That means the total cost is $1T over 100 years.

Has the Pandemic caused more than $1T of damage to the United States? We've spent more than $1T just on the government bailout, which doesn't even come close to covering the damage to individuals and the economy as a whole. I'd say it easily exceeds $1T. Far more was spent on the Iraq war than on Covid preparation, yet the latter would have paid massive returns.

Frankly, pandemic response would be a rounding error compared to the defense budget. Even $2B a year in pandemic preparation might have saved us. That's only $200B per hundred years, far less than Covid has cost the US this year.

1. Topic A is done by evil X.

2. No it's not.

3. Why are you trying to distract from the evil of X?

Great word, I have to write that down.

Less certainty, more inquiry.

I think you are not following my argument or the OP. Neither supposes that "we need" is a standalone argument. OP provides specific examples for why "we need" to do these things.

"We" doesn't mean literally every human. Do you think people are actually being misled by this? It just means something like "society at large".

"We" need plumbing. This doesn't mean you can't individually live alone in the woods without plumbing.

"Need" doesn't mean you "must" have something. You don't "need" water if you're suicidal.

"Need" is just shorthand for "sustains our current way of life". If you want to see the downfall of civilization, you don't "need" agriculture. If you don't care about people on dialysis or the millions/billions of others that would die without power, then you don't "need" electricity or internal combustion engines.

You're allowed to have these opposing views.

The "we need" arguments assume that most people want to maintain or improve standards of living.

If you want to decrease standards of living, that's a fine opinion to have (although weird). More importantly, if you don't care about society, why bother arguing this at all? Why post on HN? No one is stopping you from living a pre-plumbing, pre-agricultural life if that's what you want.

"Society" of course tries to sustain itself. If society wants to keep existing in its current form, it does need to do many things (indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, or as the OP talks about, preparing for certain dangerous situations).

They actually do donate the money; they're not trying to keep your dollar. It's difficult to acquire this data via other means, so they don't mind paying it out properly.

I don't like megacorps either but I don't see which part of the OP you disagree with.

>Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)?

No. I think a better word is "unseemly". I don't think it's hypocritical for a company or person to use carbon and then buy carbon offsets or donate to the rain forest or something.

Even if it were hypocritical I would still rather have a polluting corporation that fought pollution than a polluting corporation that didn't.

>if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there?

Many of them do just that. I don't think corporate giving is the solution to society's problems but it is a real thing that happens and can make a difference for some people.

Corporations of course do things for marketing and PR reasons. If one of you things is to encourage you to donate or to donate themselves then I don't see the problem (although I am annoyed having to press a bunch of buttons to pay).

We'll solve the problem eventually, I guess, when it becomes clear that there's no money left for bailouts.

All missed opportunities to change broken institutional structures and to do things differently.

However, this has limits. It doesn't work for large scale shortages like the oil shocks of the seventies. If everybody had saved money beforehand, there still wouldn't be more oil available in total. When the oil price doubles, you'll only be able to buy half as much with your savings.

Indeed, and there are a lot of overlapping disaster preparedness steps that make sense no matter what the triggering event happened to be, so it makes sense to establish, e.g.: robust command and control infrastructure that doesn't rely on primary infrastructure, including communications and chains of command; stockpiles of strategic durable goods like medical equipment, rations, batteries, etc.

Holy Jesus; that's massive.

Capital is not free. Typical costs of capital today are about 8% (1). You're proposing, essentially, an 8% tax — not on a firm's profits, but on a firm's expenses. I don't want you to think, "oh, that will push a few firms into failure, rendering their entire business unviable." I want you to think, "it will spare a few firms." I also shudder to think of what happens to firm formation in the face of the steep, steep barriers to entry this raises.

You propose a very, very expensive way to build resilience. You're right, though, that the costs would be borne by all of society. Maybe it's worth it? But it's a hell of an ask, and I'm skeptical.

(1) if you have better figures than http://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/... then I'm all for 'em

As far as I know most countries already do that more often than you ask for. Everyone had a strong response to the 2009 pandemic, with plans, PPE stockpiles and such. The virus turned out very mild, which lead to heeding to the advice of epidemiologists to be politically costly. But in the USA pandemic preparedness was only effectively disassembled with the 2017 update.

...which is exactly capitalism: 1) private companies are required to maximize (short term) profit as their first priority. 2) the billionaire class can heavily influence policy through regulatory capture

I suppose it could lead to a Venus like atmosphere if things got really crazy. Realistically the worst case scenario would just lead to coastal areas being uninhabitable and widespread famine and unrest while the worlds farming and population gets redistributed to more habitable latitudes. I don't think it would ever wipe out EVERYONE even if it's a sizable percentage.

According to the evidence from Brazil and India, because we watch TV. According to the evidence from China, because of access to basic healthcare[1].

(I don't know of any evidence about video games, but they'd contribute too.)

[1] China's "one child policy" is blamed for the drop in fertility there, but if you look at the charts, fertility started trending down with the "barefoot doctor" campaign (someone with basic hygiene knowledge in every village). The one child policy coincides with a slight pause in the decline.