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Comment by notNNT | Hacker News Reader

Also a major point in the Black Swan. In the Black Swan, Taleb describes that it is better for banks to fail more often than for them to be protected from any adversity. Eventually they will become "too big to fail". If something is too big to fail, you are fragile to a catastrophic failure.

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I was wondering when someone would bring up Taleb RE: this incident.

I know you aren't saying it is, but I think Taleb would argue that this incident, as he did with the coronavirus pandemic for example, isn't even a Black Swan event. It was extremely easy to predict, and you had a large number of experts warning people about it for years but being ignored. A Black Swan is unpredictable and unexpected, not something totally predictable that you decided not to prepare for anyways.

That is interesting, where does he talk about this? I'm curious to hear his reasoning. What I remember from the Black Swan is that Black Swan events are (1) rare, (2) have a non-linear/massive impact, (3) and easy to predict retrospectively. That is, a lot of people will say "of course that happened" after the fact but were never too concerned about it beforehand.

Apart from a few doomsdayers I am not aware of anybody was warning us about a crowd strike type of event. I do not know much about public health but it was my understanding that there were playbooks for an epidemic.

Even if we had a proper playbook (and we likely do), the failure is so distributed that one would need a lot of books and a lot of incident commanders to fix the problem. We are dead in the water.

I think Grey Rhino is the term to use. Risks that we can see and acknowledge yet do nothing about.

"Antifragile" is even more focused around this.

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