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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

This is where we start to wander into problems with classical set logic.

No, I'm not joking. Fuzzy sets are pretty much required for any meaningful discussion of "failed", "foreseeable" etc, if they are to be at all useful concepts: http://chester.id.au/2012/04/09/review-drift-into-failure/

Reduce foreseeability and failure to a binary toggle and you destroy enormous amounts of information with high utility so that some syllogisms still work. Wasteful.

Taleb is a very intelligent man, but AFAICT he does often reinvent existing concepts with much cooler names. "Antifragile" sounds awesome. "Robust" sounds boring.

Take "black swan", for example. Given the technology of the day, black swans simply didn't exist. Iain Banks called these "Outside Context Problems", one might also call them "paradigm-busters".

Anyhow. I should have padded out my original definition with the usual legalese about "reasonably foreseeable".

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"reasonably forseeable" is hard to define. Let us, for a moment, use being able to implement countermeasures without seeming like a crazy lunatic as a definition. As a politician in a pre-9/11 world, if you had done what would have been necessary to prevent a 9/11 (not go and arrest the very guys who did it, that would have required perfect foresight), i.e. add bulletproof doors to planes, implement the very invasive searches the TSA does etc., maybe ground commercial aviation until those measures would have been in place, it would be the end of your career. The remote possibility of a terrorist attack has only become a justification for about everything after 9/11. Also, 9/11 was just one of many terrorist threats at that time, it's just in hindsight that we consider this particular one inevitable. Edit: Spelling

Hijackings had happened many times. Including with weapons. There was plenty of knowledge that could have easily justified adding secure, lockable cockpit doors. And that would have been a good, low impact way of mitigating against known risks while also taking a whole host of unknown risks off the table or substantially reducing them, including reducing the chance of 9/11 having the impact it did or even being tried.

I think that is one of the changes that more focus on mitigating risk vs. avoiding it might have produced. E.g. when faced with heightened risk of terrorist attacks, a rational response would be to not focus so much on identifying potential attackers and stopping a specific plot, but spending more resources at looking into low impact ways to mitigate the consequences of at various broad modes of attack actually getting underway.

The specifics of 9/11 was probably near impossible to predict, but another eventual hijacking was a near certainty, and an eventual building collapse for whatever reason should have been considered a near certainty, as many high-rises have failed over the years too. The failure to reduce the potential impact of those known risks are the real failures of 9/11, not the failure to prevent the specific plot, as these were broad, known risks and the actual causes leading up to them would be largely irrelevant for a lot of mitigating actions.

> "reasonably forseeable" is hard to define.

It certainly is. The concept of negligence was reinvented or reintroduced into the Common Law starting in 1932 with Donoghue v Stevenson and the lawyers have been wrestling with it ever since. I hated Torts as a student, it's a damn fiddly area of law. Give me Trusts any day of the week.

Still: if you want to study how intelligent people have mapped out the concept of "reasonably foreseeable", then lawyers -- particularly Scots lawyers who also look to Roman law -- are the people to talk to for inspiration.

> Taleb is a very intelligent man, but AFAICT he does often reinvent existing concepts with much cooler names. "Antifragile" sounds awesome. "Robust" sounds boring.

Antifragile != robust: "The antifragile is beyond the resilient or robust. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better." (http://www.randomhouse.com/book/176227/antifragile-things-th...)

I don't think this is a meaningful addition. Resilient systems are not static, they evolve; that's how they become resilient in the first place.

Relabelling is the marketing game; to get your businessy-idea-book in the best-sellers list you need everyone to replace "practice makes perfect" with "10000 hours".

Yep. And in fact marketers didn't invent relabelling (Tallyrand had a witty remark that one of the functions of the State is to rename odious institutions and I would not be surprised if Confucius had this phenomenon in mind when he got grumpy about the Rectification of the Names).

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