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

[Adrian Tymes]

On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 3:39 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki
<rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 12:56 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 14, 2012 at 2:05 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki
>> <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>
>> That is overstating things, I think.  Look at, for instance,
>> Hurricane Sandy.  The US government was not the main
>> cause of the event, and it demonstrably helped many of
>> those harmed by the unusual weather.
>
> ### The government collected monies from various productive workers
> and (slowly and haphazardly) disbursed them to some affected by the
> storm. This does not mean that it helped us in general

I didn't say it helped "us in general", just "many of those
harmed by the unusual weather".

Also, whatever contributory effect the government's
insurance may have had in lessening the risk of people
living in dangerous places:

1) Most of the places hit by Sandy were not considered
dangerous.  (Unless, say, you consider the whole of
Manhattan Island to be "dangerous" such that people
should not live there?)

2) Government insurance did not actually, directly
cause the hurricane to exist.  (Making a bad situation
worse is distinct from causing the bad situation in the
first place.)  Saying some entity is the "main cause"
of a thing is saying that they are the cause of that
thing, and whatever else it may have done relative to
Hurricane Sandy, the US government did not create it.