[ExI] Avoiding bad black swan events/was Re: extropy-chat Digest, Vol 111, Issue 15

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Wed, Dec 12, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Dan <dan_ust at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> By the way, speaking of "black swans," have you read Taleb's latest book,
> _Antifragility_? I'm most of the way through the audio version of it. Some
> interesting ideas and, of course, some stuff I'd disagree on, but not by
> much. I enjoyed his earlier books too, though _Fooled by Randomness_ and
> _The Black Swan_ seemed like the same book just rewritten. Maybe I'll have
> to go back to them to see if this is just my impression now because I went
> through so many years ago.

### I am also mostly done with this book and I can recommend it heartily.

The one insight that I agree with the most is the observation that
size counts - the larger the size of a network, the higher the risks
of catastrophic failure due to internal inconsistencies, and that risk
increases non-linearly - at first slowly with increasing size, then
faster and faster. At the same time the resources generated by the
network are also changing non-linearly but in a different fashion -
there are large gains in small networks but as the size of the network
grows, the gains are progressively smaller. There is a point where the
two curves intersect - networks large enough to generate most of the
gains from networking but small enough not to incur most of the costs
of networking.

Any governing body larger than a Swiss canton is on the unfavorable
side of the intersection point. Those who think the US government will
help them in a Black Swan, rather than being the main cause and focus
of the event, are fooling themselves.

BTW, I have been reading recently about the Swiss army preparing for
possible war in Europe, related to economic collapse within the
Eurozone. The Swiss are the grand-daddies of all preppers.

Rafal