11 ms·

Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The b

Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The black swan is our collective ineptitude in handling the crisis, not the virus itself. We’ve had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It’s not as though the world went “a virus what is this we’ve never seen anything like it”. The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago. We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn’t how unexpected it was, it’s how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.

fulafel 6y ago
Black swan events may be predictable in their eventuality but are blind spots for human psychology because they are sufficiently rare.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  Black swan events aren't predictable by definition. They're usually events sufficiently rare that when they happen, it's the first time that category of event has been observed. This, we can't assess their likelihood since we have no real prior. So a market crash, plague, asteroid, etc. aren't black swan events. They just aren't rare enough. We've seen them. They have an annual probability. Hell, a COVID-like illness isn't even all that unlikely. A lethal fungal plague might be, since we've never seen such a thing in humans, although we've seen that in other mammals so it shouldn't come as a total shock. As a better example, an AI apocalypse would be a black swan since we've never observed such an event and have no really great way of assessing its likelihood. Although we've some idea of that possibility. To really get at the meat of it, consider the name. Black swans came as a surprise when Europeans visited Australia because a non-white swan had never before been observed. No one would even have thought to ask the question "what are the odds you find an all black swan in Australia?"
  - fulafel 6y ago
    I think you are working with a harder defn of it than the original definition: WP: "Based on the [Taleb]'s criteria: 1 The event is a surprise (to the observer). 2 The event has a major effect. 3 After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected [...]"
    - nstart 6y ago
      I don't mean to add any fire to the debate. Just wanted to gently point out that the first recorded instances of a pandemic have happened so a pandemic does break the 3rd rule. I think other commenters have pointed out that the reaction of global leadership has been a surprise with major effects that will be rationalised in the future. Making their reaction to the event itself the black swan event. In a rational world, we'd have expected leaders to band together against a potential pandemic. That this level of incompetency should have been expected will be the rationalization that follows.
- prox 6y ago
  If you read the book Black Swan, it is exactly one of its defining characteristics that it is unpredictable. The only thing you can do against black swans is making systems less fragile.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Yes, there is a big difference between predicting an occurrence and theoretically knowing about it's possibility / eventual occurrence. Here's Talebs essay for those without the book: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fc4/ed36e247194c9c0b7adfec8d92abebea289a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fc4/ed36e247194c9c0b7adfec...
  - WA 6y ago
    Small nitpick: Unpredictable for the observer. So in a way this pandemic was a black swan for some (naive) people. On the other hand, I think it's good that someone like Taleb now goes around and pokes all the policymakers and governments that nothing of this was unpredictable and Corona is a white swan event.
    - prox 6y ago
      It’s been a while I read it, but you are right. Personally I think it already ranks amongst the most important books of the 21st century. Everyone should read it.
hgibbs 6y ago
The definition from Wikipedia reads: "The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight." So predictability is not a criteria.
- ses1984 6y ago
  >comes as a surprise Isn't that related to predictability?
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    people get surprised all the time by events that have a low percentage chance of happening but are not unique, I mean people get surprised when their spouse cheats on them and that isn't particularly unlikely. Anyway, I would agree a black swan needs a very low chance of happening, but not that it has to be the first time it has ever happened. Certainly when the Europeans saw the black swan in Australia it was the first time they had seen one, but probably not the first time they had seen a variation of a species in a non-European location that looked slightly different than expected. on edit: some clarifications.
- mercutio2 6y ago
  Wikipedia is not an authority on anything. It will be just as wrong as the misconceptions of whoever wrote the synopsis. The term black swan in this context was coined by Nassim Taleb; he wrote a book about it, which when fully understood distinguishes predictable but rare from completely unexpected. That Wikipedia manages to mangle this doesn’t mean the originator of the term suddenly became wrong.
grey-area 6y ago
You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk. The spread of coronavirus outside China was in no way inevitable. Several potential pandemics were handled internally, this one escaped due to denial and incompetence, at which point it was harder to control. If it is utterly predictable we should be able to predict its course and fatalities - we can't. If we had a large asteroid strike, famine, a robot rebellion, a collapse in world supply chains or super-volcano eruption it'd be 'inevitable' according to somebody somewhere, but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it.
- osrec 6y ago
  > didn't prepare for it. Correct, we didn't prepare for it. I would even say that politics stifled our response to a large degree. But, in my opinion, to say we didn't expect it, is incorrect. Sure, the average Joe may not have understood the potential risks, however epidemiologists were literally screaming the graveness of the situation at the public. The fact that people decided not to take heed was their ineptitude. The science and logic required to reduce the impact of the virus were all available, and the actions to be taken were fairly simple. The fact that people refused to take those actions in a timely manner, and that governments prioritised economy over public health are some of the reasons why we're in this mess. But we certainly were not caught by surprise - we had the time to react, and the knowledge to react well.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    The thing is they actually have not prioritised anything, they thought they were prioritising, but actually caused a deeper recession by failing to contain the virus. It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.
- lazyasciiart 6y ago
  What about the set of events that "someone somewhere spent millions of dollars on and defined it as a national security risk and set up federally managed groups and processes to guard against it"? Seems to be a slightly smaller set.
pella 6y ago
"Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.” read more : NewYorker:"The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System" ( April 21, 2020 ) https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...
- notahacker 6y ago
  Have to say I'm struggling to see the difference between the pandemic and the financial crisis. Both were utterly predictable as things which could happen but difficult to time [if anything, the financial crisis was much more predictable] and both were exacerbated because systems and economies were built around assuming such scenarios were unlikely in the immediate future and inherently self-limiting
  - PoachedSausage 6y ago
    I don't see much difference either. Maybe one factor in something being a Black Swan is just how widely or not the predictions are believed. There were plenty of whisperings on the internet about a potential problem with sub-prime mortgages way before 2007. I even had a lecturer at university talking about Kondratiev waves[0] and how we were possibly nearing the end of one. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
  - retube 6y ago
    agreed
legulere 6y ago
It was unpredictable in the sense that we expected another influenza epidemic. SARS 1 and MERS were easier to contain as patients show more symptoms.
jfoster 6y ago
You don't have to go back to 1918. 1957 - 1958 pandemic estimated to have killed ~1.1 million people worldwide: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi... 1968 pandemic estimated to have killed 1 million worldwide: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm... I think of SARS & MERS as near-misses. They could've been a lot worse if the viruses were just a bit more contagious. Overall, it seems like some form of pandemic could be expected at least every 25 years or so, on average! I also wonder if this might be increasing in frequency as the world population grows & global travel becomes ever more common. I think covid has been handled exceptionally poorly at every turn. Globally, we need to get a lot better at handling something like this. As bad as some viruses have been, it's not difficult to imagine even worse ones if a parameter or two were tweaked.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Honestly given how the population in 1918 was between 1-2 billion [1], 1957 2.8 billion and 1968 3.5 billion, given that there's over twice as many people around now, we got off lightly. [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... first source I found, don't quote me on it
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Also: - AIDS - an ongoing pandemic, 32 000 000 + deaths and counting (per Wikipedia). (The cynical adage about news applies here: "nothing ever happens in Africa.") Mad Cow disease - major near miss. I am still not allowed to donate blood to this day, because I was in the UK in the mid-'80s. It's egregiously lazy to call Covid-19 a "black swan".
atoav 6y ago
I didn't perceive it as a black swan at all. It was more like having more snow in the winter than we are used to and therefore having roofs collapse. — yes — there was more snow than usual, but — no — it was still in tune with what would have been reasonable to assume. Our roofs didn't collapse because of an unfantomable amount of snow, our roofs collapse because they were poorly built, badly maintained and all the money went into the fences to our neighbours instead (partly because we hate them, partly because we want to impress them).
aaron695 6y ago
> Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? Because A Black Swan event is a Russell's teapot. So since Black Swan events have no meaning, people assign meaning to them. Since everyone talks about Black Swan events so much, they must exist right? Which Covid-19 fits.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
arethuza 6y ago
I was tidying out some books the other day and I found an excellent book that I had read ~1995: "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garret: https://www.lauriegarrett.com/the-coming-plague https://www.lauriegarrett.com/the-coming-plague I'm slowly re-reading it again and it is quite surreal - the first chapter describes a team from the US investigating a nasty disease in South America in the 1950s and literally one of the complaints their senior's have about the project is that it is "no worse than flu" when it was actually a highly dangerous disease. The basic message of this book is: it's not if but when this happens.
lordnacho 6y ago
Imagine there's a society at the bottom of a valley. Every 10 years, there's a flood which means everyone will have to move to the mountains for 3 months and eat stored food. So the wise old men make a flood council, to be populated with responsible people who ensure there's huts in the mountains and plenty of food. Except it doesn't flood like a clockwork every 10 years. It's more like an annual dice roll. It can happen more often, but it can also happen less often. It's entirely within the scope of probability that kids are born and grow to be adults without a flood. After a three decades, what has happened? Someone will have the brilliant idea of using the spare food. Initially it will seem necessary, as hard times have arrived due to other circumstances. Eventually, people forget about filling it up. Someone else will decide the flood huts are a waste, a bunch of empty homes with great views that nobody ever lives in. Why not sell it? The flood council's work becomes undermined by their cost. People see there's all these highly educated people working on a plan that nobody's ever used. They see fat cats flying around to flood conferences, big flood taking a tax on everyone, and fearmongering whenever the flood council reminds people to be prepared. So the flood eventually happens, people are drowned and the survivors starve. "But there was no way to see it coming."
- chimprich 6y ago
  And even when the flood is actually occurring, people will shout it down as a hoax, or argue that any countermeasures have been a massive overreaction because only x people have drowned so far. Any scientific work that produces an uncomfortable prediction will be written off as doom-mongering and any proposal that would impact people's personal comfort level will be declared as unworkable and unreasonable.
- gherkinnn 6y ago
  One of the benefits of a state is that it does not need to operate like a business. It can and should maintain these refuges and keep them stocked. Perishables get replaced and consumed in the valley. A state has the ability to stand above current whims. At the very least, contingency plans don’t go stale. The second aspect is us facing the pandemic. Playing it down, calling it a hoax, refusing to wear a mask. Stomping around with guns. Making it a partisan issue. War rhetoric. It’s utterly insane. A few calm generations in the flood valley don’t quite explain this.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Considering the population to the time of great plagues, this one is pretty harmless in comparison and I don't think the reaction was particularly bad. I hope the long term effects aren't as pronounced as feared. The economic damage will be significant and we will see that in a few weeks probably.
netcan 6y ago
Exactly. We have also seen (in eurioe and the US) the kind of political paradigms that accompany, and cover for, systematic ineptitude. Lockdown Vs Not has been (is) mostly centred around a specific dichotomy. Freedom, economic health, employment, etc one hand. The spread of covid in the other. Those trade-off a exist, but just because a trade-off exists does not mean that it is always the operative dynamic. It is just the only decision left when ineptitude takes other options off the table. Institutional competency is a primary force. Where I live (Ireland) a failure to equip & prepare nursing homes accounted for a large number of deaths. It was just out of reach, in terms of our institutional ability to react in the necesytimeframe. Testing, on a scale that can control the pandemic, was feasible. It would have been an achievement, but it was not impossible. Ireland has a large meditech & pharma industry. The resource and knowledge exist. We just weren't able to do it. It can't be a question of costs. The cost in lives and their value might be debatable. The cost in money is not. What does a month of lockdown cost?
puranjay 6y ago
I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who still refuse to believe that this pandemic even exists or that we are living through it. There is collective denial and disbelief. Even though we've had pandemics throughout human history. We've also had a constant stream of infectious diseases with pandemic potential - almost every year - for as long as I can remember. Epidemiologists have been warning us that it was a matter of when, not if, when a "big one" strikes. This is like experiencing annual tremors in a heavy seismic zone, then acting shocked when the earthquake eventually hits.
SuoDuanDao 6y ago
But black swans always look obvious in retrospect. There were always reasons to believe a given black swan would happen, it's just that those reasons were ignored beforehand. The possibility of a plague was well known, but besides people in the medical field there wasn't much thought put towards them. Heck, I well knew that medical experts were predicting a plague, but if you'd asked me in 2019 what the next black swan would be I'd have guessed catastrophic climate change.

fulafel 6y ago

Black swan events may be predictable in their eventuality but are blind spots for human psychology because they are sufficiently rare.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
Black swan events aren't predictable by definition. They're usually events sufficiently rare that when they happen, it's the first time that category of event has been observed. This, we can't assess their likelihood since we have no real prior. So a market crash, plague, asteroid, etc. aren't black swan events. They just aren't rare enough. We've seen them. They have an annual probability. Hell, a COVID-like illness isn't even all that unlikely. A lethal fungal plague might be, since we've never seen such a thing in humans, although we've seen that in other mammals so it shouldn't come as a total shock. As a better example, an AI apocalypse would be a black swan since we've never observed such an event and have no really great way of assessing its likelihood. Although we've some idea of that possibility. To really get at the meat of it, consider the name. Black swans came as a surprise when Europeans visited Australia because a non-white swan had never before been observed. No one would even have thought to ask the question "what are the odds you find an all black swan in Australia?"
- fulafel 6y ago
  I think you are working with a harder defn of it than the original definition: WP: "Based on the [Taleb]'s criteria: 1 The event is a surprise (to the observer). 2 The event has a major effect. 3 After the first recorded instance of the event, it is rationalized by hindsight, as if it could have been expected [...]"
  - nstart 6y ago
    I don't mean to add any fire to the debate. Just wanted to gently point out that the first recorded instances of a pandemic have happened so a pandemic does break the 3rd rule. I think other commenters have pointed out that the reaction of global leadership has been a surprise with major effects that will be rationalised in the future. Making their reaction to the event itself the black swan event. In a rational world, we'd have expected leaders to band together against a potential pandemic. That this level of incompetency should have been expected will be the rationalization that follows.
prox 6y ago
If you read the book Black Swan, it is exactly one of its defining characteristics that it is unpredictable. The only thing you can do against black swans is making systems less fragile.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Yes, there is a big difference between predicting an occurrence and theoretically knowing about it's possibility / eventual occurrence. Here's Talebs essay for those without the book: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fc4/ed36e247194c9c0b7adfec8d92abebea289a.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6fc4/ed36e247194c9c0b7adfec...
- WA 6y ago
  Small nitpick: Unpredictable for the observer. So in a way this pandemic was a black swan for some (naive) people. On the other hand, I think it's good that someone like Taleb now goes around and pokes all the policymakers and governments that nothing of this was unpredictable and Corona is a white swan event.
  - prox 6y ago
    It’s been a while I read it, but you are right. Personally I think it already ranks amongst the most important books of the 21st century. Everyone should read it.

hgibbs 6y ago

The definition from Wikipedia reads: "The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight." So predictability is not a criteria.

ses1984 6y ago
>comes as a surprise Isn't that related to predictability?
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  people get surprised all the time by events that have a low percentage chance of happening but are not unique, I mean people get surprised when their spouse cheats on them and that isn't particularly unlikely. Anyway, I would agree a black swan needs a very low chance of happening, but not that it has to be the first time it has ever happened. Certainly when the Europeans saw the black swan in Australia it was the first time they had seen one, but probably not the first time they had seen a variation of a species in a non-European location that looked slightly different than expected. on edit: some clarifications.
mercutio2 6y ago
Wikipedia is not an authority on anything. It will be just as wrong as the misconceptions of whoever wrote the synopsis. The term black swan in this context was coined by Nassim Taleb; he wrote a book about it, which when fully understood distinguishes predictable but rare from completely unexpected. That Wikipedia manages to mangle this doesn’t mean the originator of the term suddenly became wrong.

grey-area 6y ago

You can convincingly say this in retrospect about any event that happened, after all, it happened; it can't be so improbable and someone somewhere inevitably warned about the risk. The spread of coronavirus outside China was in no way inevitable. Several potential pandemics were handled internally, this one escaped due to denial and incompetence, at which point it was harder to control. If it is utterly predictable we should be able to predict its course and fatalities - we can't. If we had a large asteroid strike, famine, a robot rebellion, a collapse in world supply chains or super-volcano eruption it'd be 'inevitable' according to somebody somewhere, but most of the world didn't expect it and didn't prepare for it.

osrec 6y ago
> didn't prepare for it. Correct, we didn't prepare for it. I would even say that politics stifled our response to a large degree. But, in my opinion, to say we didn't expect it, is incorrect. Sure, the average Joe may not have understood the potential risks, however epidemiologists were literally screaming the graveness of the situation at the public. The fact that people decided not to take heed was their ineptitude. The science and logic required to reduce the impact of the virus were all available, and the actions to be taken were fairly simple. The fact that people refused to take those actions in a timely manner, and that governments prioritised economy over public health are some of the reasons why we're in this mess. But we certainly were not caught by surprise - we had the time to react, and the knowledge to react well.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  The thing is they actually have not prioritised anything, they thought they were prioritising, but actually caused a deeper recession by failing to contain the virus. It's like prioritising cooking dinner over dealing with the house fire - it doesn't work that way.
lazyasciiart 6y ago
What about the set of events that "someone somewhere spent millions of dollars on and defined it as a national security risk and set up federally managed groups and processes to guard against it"? Seems to be a slightly smaller set.

pella 6y ago

"Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.” read more : NewYorker:"The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System" ( April 21, 2020 ) https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-isnt-a-black-swan-but-a-portent-of-a-more-fragile-global-system https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...

notahacker 6y ago
Have to say I'm struggling to see the difference between the pandemic and the financial crisis. Both were utterly predictable as things which could happen but difficult to time [if anything, the financial crisis was much more predictable] and both were exacerbated because systems and economies were built around assuming such scenarios were unlikely in the immediate future and inherently self-limiting
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  I don't see much difference either. Maybe one factor in something being a Black Swan is just how widely or not the predictions are believed. There were plenty of whisperings on the internet about a potential problem with sub-prime mortgages way before 2007. I even had a lecturer at university talking about Kondratiev waves[0] and how we were possibly nearing the end of one. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
- retube 6y ago
  agreed

legulere 6y ago

It was unpredictable in the sense that we expected another influenza epidemic. SARS 1 and MERS were easier to contain as patients show more symptoms.

jfoster 6y ago

You don't have to go back to 1918. 1957 - 1958 pandemic estimated to have killed ~1.1 million people worldwide: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi... 1968 pandemic estimated to have killed 1 million worldwide: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.htm... I think of SARS & MERS as near-misses. They could've been a lot worse if the viruses were just a bit more contagious. Overall, it seems like some form of pandemic could be expected at least every 25 years or so, on average! I also wonder if this might be increasing in frequency as the world population grows & global travel becomes ever more common. I think covid has been handled exceptionally poorly at every turn. Globally, we need to get a lot better at handling something like this. As bad as some viruses have been, it's not difficult to imagine even worse ones if a parameter or two were tweaked.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Honestly given how the population in 1918 was between 1-2 billion [1], 1957 2.8 billion and 1968 3.5 billion, given that there's over twice as many people around now, we got off lightly. [1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat... first source I found, don't quote me on it
tuatoru 6y ago
Also: - AIDS - an ongoing pandemic, 32 000 000 + deaths and counting (per Wikipedia). (The cynical adage about news applies here: "nothing ever happens in Africa.") Mad Cow disease - major near miss. I am still not allowed to donate blood to this day, because I was in the UK in the mid-'80s. It's egregiously lazy to call Covid-19 a "black swan".

atoav 6y ago

I didn't perceive it as a black swan at all. It was more like having more snow in the winter than we are used to and therefore having roofs collapse. — yes — there was more snow than usual, but — no — it was still in tune with what would have been reasonable to assume. Our roofs didn't collapse because of an unfantomable amount of snow, our roofs collapse because they were poorly built, badly maintained and all the money went into the fences to our neighbours instead (partly because we hate them, partly because we want to impress them).

aaron695 6y ago

> Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? Because A Black Swan event is a Russell's teapot. So since Black Swan events have no meaning, people assign meaning to them. Since everyone talks about Black Swan events so much, they must exist right? Which Covid-19 fits.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

arethuza 6y ago

I was tidying out some books the other day and I found an excellent book that I had read ~1995: "The Coming Plague" by Laurie Garret: https://www.lauriegarrett.com/the-coming-plague https://www.lauriegarrett.com/the-coming-plague I'm slowly re-reading it again and it is quite surreal - the first chapter describes a team from the US investigating a nasty disease in South America in the 1950s and literally one of the complaints their senior's have about the project is that it is "no worse than flu" when it was actually a highly dangerous disease. The basic message of this book is: it's not if but when this happens.

lordnacho 6y ago

Imagine there's a society at the bottom of a valley. Every 10 years, there's a flood which means everyone will have to move to the mountains for 3 months and eat stored food. So the wise old men make a flood council, to be populated with responsible people who ensure there's huts in the mountains and plenty of food. Except it doesn't flood like a clockwork every 10 years. It's more like an annual dice roll. It can happen more often, but it can also happen less often. It's entirely within the scope of probability that kids are born and grow to be adults without a flood. After a three decades, what has happened? Someone will have the brilliant idea of using the spare food. Initially it will seem necessary, as hard times have arrived due to other circumstances. Eventually, people forget about filling it up. Someone else will decide the flood huts are a waste, a bunch of empty homes with great views that nobody ever lives in. Why not sell it? The flood council's work becomes undermined by their cost. People see there's all these highly educated people working on a plan that nobody's ever used. They see fat cats flying around to flood conferences, big flood taking a tax on everyone, and fearmongering whenever the flood council reminds people to be prepared. So the flood eventually happens, people are drowned and the survivors starve. "But there was no way to see it coming."

chimprich 6y ago
And even when the flood is actually occurring, people will shout it down as a hoax, or argue that any countermeasures have been a massive overreaction because only x people have drowned so far. Any scientific work that produces an uncomfortable prediction will be written off as doom-mongering and any proposal that would impact people's personal comfort level will be declared as unworkable and unreasonable.
gherkinnn 6y ago
One of the benefits of a state is that it does not need to operate like a business. It can and should maintain these refuges and keep them stocked. Perishables get replaced and consumed in the valley. A state has the ability to stand above current whims. At the very least, contingency plans don’t go stale. The second aspect is us facing the pandemic. Playing it down, calling it a hoax, refusing to wear a mask. Stomping around with guns. Making it a partisan issue. War rhetoric. It’s utterly insane. A few calm generations in the flood valley don’t quite explain this.

raxxorrax 6y ago

Considering the population to the time of great plagues, this one is pretty harmless in comparison and I don't think the reaction was particularly bad. I hope the long term effects aren't as pronounced as feared. The economic damage will be significant and we will see that in a few weeks probably.

netcan 6y ago

Exactly. We have also seen (in eurioe and the US) the kind of political paradigms that accompany, and cover for, systematic ineptitude. Lockdown Vs Not has been (is) mostly centred around a specific dichotomy. Freedom, economic health, employment, etc one hand. The spread of covid in the other. Those trade-off a exist, but just because a trade-off exists does not mean that it is always the operative dynamic. It is just the only decision left when ineptitude takes other options off the table. Institutional competency is a primary force. Where I live (Ireland) a failure to equip & prepare nursing homes accounted for a large number of deaths. It was just out of reach, in terms of our institutional ability to react in the necesytimeframe. Testing, on a scale that can control the pandemic, was feasible. It would have been an achievement, but it was not impossible. Ireland has a large meditech & pharma industry. The resource and knowledge exist. We just weren't able to do it. It can't be a question of costs. The cost in lives and their value might be debatable. The cost in money is not. What does a month of lockdown cost?

puranjay 6y ago

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who still refuse to believe that this pandemic even exists or that we are living through it. There is collective denial and disbelief. Even though we've had pandemics throughout human history. We've also had a constant stream of infectious diseases with pandemic potential - almost every year - for as long as I can remember. Epidemiologists have been warning us that it was a matter of when, not if, when a "big one" strikes. This is like experiencing annual tremors in a heavy seismic zone, then acting shocked when the earthquake eventually hits.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago

But black swans always look obvious in retrospect. There were always reasons to believe a given black swan would happen, it's just that those reasons were ignored beforehand. The possibility of a plague was well known, but besides people in the medical field there wasn't much thought put towards them. Heck, I well knew that medical experts were predicting a plague, but if you'd asked me in 2019 what the next black swan would be I'd have guessed catastrophic climate change.