Unfortunately I did not save the tweet and now it’s lost to the mists of time, but I saw someone two or three days ago saying that we should not prepare for tail risks because the nature of the risk is unknown.

This wasn’t some random mook. It was an “expert” of some stripe.

And all I have to say about that is: FUCKING IDIOTIC. It made me so angry at the time I could not even write about it.

Of course, they were talking about the pandemic, which was in fact a known and nearly-inevitable risk, so they started off wrong and it did not get any better from there. The point is not to prepare explicitly for every tail risk, but to build resilience and (as Nicholas Nassim Taleb calls it) anti-fragility into systems to allow them to much more easily endure those tail risks.

To paraphrase Charles Babbage, I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that allows someone to think that because tail risks are unpredictable that we should do no preparation for them.

These are our “experts,” Fortuna help us.