Chapters 15 & 16
Rolf's Points
(What's mentioned in the book)
On ‘because of X’, Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written about the journalistic urge to find the one reason for something in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin Books, London, 2008).
Also see, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (Penguin Books, London, 2012).
See also Roy F. Baumeister, The Cultural Animal: Human Nature, Meaning, and Social Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005), p.206 ff.
On the prevention of 9/11 by installing locks on cockpit doors, see Taleb,The Black Swan, p.xxiii–xxiv.
See also Matt Ridley, ‘Why Is It So Cool to Be Gloomy?’ in the Wall Street Journal, 16 November 2018.
On the confusion between ‘preventative’ and ‘non-existent’, see Jackson, You Are What You Read. This is a superb manifesto for constructive journalism. Constructive journalism aims to also report on preventative
success stories, thus making them ‘existent’ in the reader’s mind.
Vale's Points
(What's supplemented when Vale was reading)
An example that was explored was that in a business meeting, the management tends to go through points on the day's agenda as submitted by the CEO, and not through points that might be more important but aren't on the agenda.
However some can argue that the management trusts that the CEO has done sufficient preparation to include whatever's important in the agenda.
> "If it's important, why wasn't it on the agenda?"
How awesome it would be if we had a nobel prize for Prevention! Because such things are (understandably) often overlooked. But then again it may be super difficult to convince others because if a catastrophic accident did not happen, then how do we know for certain the actual odds that it could happen?