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

Subject: Re: [OM] [OT] In case you hadn't heard....
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:46:16 -0400
When you read Taleb you will be depressed that almost none of us can 
ever manage to think outside the box.  :-)

Chuck Norcutt


On 3/24/2014 5:26 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> 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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