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Comment by zarakshR | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I was shocked to learn that models of aeroplanes don't even account for the possibility of the plane being blown up mid-flight by a stray anti-air missile.

It seems aerospace engineers are just like priests and counselors in the courts of ancient kings.....

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Which aerospace engineering models don't account for those? The intentionally simplified ones, which are mostly used for civilian stuff? Note that about 0.00001% of civilian aircraft are negatively impacted by stray anti-aircraft missiles.

Or the more complex models, typical for military use? Reality: Accounting for damage from weapons, when appropriate, is a really big thing in aerospace engineering. And has been for 80+ years.

Vs. 100% of modern economies have been very negatively impacted by sudden cut-offs of energy supplies (due to coal miners' strikes, naval blockades, the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, etc., etc.).

The difference is that the AE's care.

Modelling energy supply shocks is pretty normal.

The core of the analogy made was that economic models rarely account for basically any variables that all other reality-based models have to live on. Yeah your analogy highlights the silliness of designing for EVERY particular catalyst for failure. But it’d be a better comparison if you were saying it’d be more like if plane builders never considered the possibility at all that they might encounter bad air, an adversarial’s airspace, or engine failure.

But plane builders do a whole lot more in terms of “what if bad thing x happened” than priests, politicians, and economists, maybe not JUST due to the direct, unambiguous impact of failure.

> core of the analogy made was that economic models rarely account for basically any variables that all other reality-based models have to live on

Energy intensity of GDP is a deeply studied statistic.

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