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Re: [OM] [OT] In case you hadn't heard....

Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] In case you hadn't heard....
From: Andrew Fildes <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 08:26:19 +1100
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.

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