Re:On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimat...
by sveme on Thursday October 01, 2015 @07:05AM
(#10310332)
Just a side remark, I always wonder when reading about Taleb whether he was truly the first to discover the balance between fragility and robustness or anti-fragility. I remember some really inspiring work by John Doyle [1] at Caltech in the early 2000s on the concept of Highly Optimized Tolerance [2] and complexity and robustness [3], stating that natural and engineered networks exhibit a high tolerance towards common perturbations, yet can show catastrophic failures when encountering extremely rare events (as described by power law distributions). Never read much about Nassim Taleb's hypotheses, yet sounds similar at first. Has Taleb popularized a concept that got stuck in the unpopulated wasteland between theoretical physics and control theory?
[1] http://leecenter.caltech.edu/doyle-res.html
[2] Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed systems, JM Carlson, J Doyle, Phys Rev E 60(2) 2, 1999
Life is fragile (to borrow Talebs word). Weather, environment (think supervulcanoes) and man itself (violent conflict, nuclear events) all have the capacity to do enormous damage and are a threat to society.
I know it's a variation on the age old question "What's the use of #$this_science?", but even Talebs own narrative goes into making systems 'antifragile'. You can only make systems antifragile for so far as the causes of the fragility are understood and manageable. So for an insurer we can do something with a 1-in-200 chance of total ruin: don't insure. A society can take measures to build earthquake-resistant buildings. Perhaps even move away cities from supervolcanoes.
But in case of violent conflict: What can we do to prevent the US - China war? (To name another now trending topic [1]) Or the next black swan conflict?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309448 (edit, thanks!: changed link to The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. And China Headed for War?)