The weather here is very unItalian, cold, windy, grey. When the sun breaks I go onto the balcony to read, at present Purgatorio and Black Swan. I would kind of agree with Bruce Charlton that Nassim Taleb seems “consumed with pride” but then this isn’t incongruous with high talent/genius. Taleb is a good read, even if I sometimes find him a bit of a know-it-all in his Socratic “know-nothing-at-all” pose.

I just saw this video by Coach Red Pill:

I’m not as smart as Coach Red Pill of course, and certainly don’t know as much about statistics & forecasts, but it seems to me that he’s making a mistake – he’s projecting a linear (if that makes sense for exponential growth) progression, and saying that major infrastructural services will collapse at such-and-such a point; however, my understanding, as a numerical illiterate, is that things rarely progress in a predictable and stable fashion. For example, as Anonymous Conservative has observed, the R0 (infection rate) will be higher at first as no one is taking precautions, and the toilet-seat-lickers & Springbreakers cull themselves from the herd; but then the ‘rona will meet stubborn, Marine-like resistance, an increasingly stubborn resistance as finally people walk about in full Hazmat suits and bleach spray.

In every real world system, the situation is dynamic as the actors react to stimuli; even the wise cannot see all ends, as Gandalf would say, and Taleb is, I suspect, right to criticise the so-called masters of the universe who sell themselves as prescient rather than haphazardly lucky. I think of this via the offside rule in football – it was originally intended to stop an attacker lurking by the enemy goals, but the defending team can actually provoke an opposing striker into violating the rule, to the defendant’s advantage. Every rule will provoke unexpected responses from the actors within the game, and these responses will trigger additional responses from other actors, until you have a hurly burly largely unmediated by the initial parameters.

Not to mention Black Swan phenomena, which are such precisely because they cannot really be predicted; merely, perhaps, imagined.