Isn’t there a bias something like: “If something actually happens, then people believe that it was foreseeable before it happened.”?
Hindsight Bias and, to an extent, Taleb’s Narrative Fallacy. This whole topic is quite Talebian. How do we plan for disasters we can’t foresee? As Robin says,
There is a vast space of possible things that can go wrong, so each plan will have to cover a pretty wide range of scenarios.
While there might be a very wide range of causes for disasters, the possible effects are likely to be fewer. A government can plan for a crisis by making a shortlist of bad things and planning how to limit their effect, and can deal with the underlying cause on-the-fly. By analogy to emergency medicine, deal with easy-to-see life-threatening symptoms first and figure out the underlying cause later when the patient is stablised. In financial disaster planning, decide how to deal with known knowns like high unemployment, high interest rates, inflation and so on beforehand then figure out how to deal with the failing banks as you go along.
Johnicholas:
Isn’t there a bias something like: “If something actually happens, then people believe that it was foreseeable before it happened.”?
Hindsight Bias and, to an extent, Taleb’s Narrative Fallacy. This whole topic is quite Talebian. How do we plan for disasters we can’t foresee? As Robin says,
There is a vast space of possible things that can go wrong, so each plan will have to cover a pretty wide range of scenarios.
While there might be a very wide range of causes for disasters, the possible effects are likely to be fewer. A government can plan for a crisis by making a shortlist of bad things and planning how to limit their effect, and can deal with the underlying cause on-the-fly. By analogy to emergency medicine, deal with easy-to-see life-threatening symptoms first and figure out the underlying cause later when the patient is stablised. In financial disaster planning, decide how to deal with known knowns like high unemployment, high interest rates, inflation and so on beforehand then figure out how to deal with the failing banks as you go along.