Posted on 04/19/2020 6:09:25 AM PDT by Kaslin
The advent of COVID-19 and the subsequent nation-wide lockdown amounts to a wake-up call of historical proportions. It has alerted us to the possibility of “black swans” swimming into our lives, or in the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his bestselling The Black Swan, our susceptibility to “the role of the exceptional event leading to the degradation of predictability.”
A “black swan” is characterized by three attributes: “it is a rarity,” “it causes an extreme impact,” and we come to understand it only “after the fact.” The terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 was such a “black swan” -- a malign event we did not expect and plan for. At the same time, most beneficial discoveries and technologies did not come from design, planning or predictable outcomes but were rare events with positive implications; for example, Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin. But what most concerns us is the negative “black swan,” with its destructive radius owing much of its malignity to the “built-in defect of conventional wisdom.”
Of course, the trope of the “black swan” is not Taleb’s invention but enjoys a long pedigree, going back to the Latin poet Juvenal’s sixth Satire against marriage, where the perfect wife is considered a disaster since she would be impossible to live with. In other words, something “good” = something “bad.”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Anyone who thinks the threat of an EMP is science fiction is literally insane, and not worthy of anyone's time or attention.
I think it’s incomprehensible to some, that such an event could ever happen.
An interesting and important article... I wish the author had not relied on Roget’s Thesaurus in every paragraph. If anyone is going to step up to this challenge, it’s President Donald J. Trump... He fights!
The main Electromagnetic Pulse threat is from Our Mr. Sun. The giant solar storm of 1859 caused the Carrington Event, which knocked out telegraph wires in many areas. Not a single computer system was damaged, however.
The solar flare of March 1989 knocked out Quebec’s electrical transmission system for nine hours.
We have one incidence of a man-made EMP attack: the 1962 Starfish Prime 1.4 megaton H-bomb test that was detonated 250 miles above Johnson Atoll, about 900 miles from Hawaii. 300 streetlights were knocked out in Hawaii, garage door openers were damaged, and burglar alarms were triggered. Phone service from Kauai was disrupted.
I’m not worried so much about the effects of an EMP attack. I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but the real problems will be from the massive full-scale nuclear retaliation and exchange that would ensue. Nobody is going to be able to get away with an EMP attack without a subsequent visit from our submarine fleet.
The real “black swan” is that China is at war with us. Every possible plan of attack — and the infiltration that has already occurred — needs to be quickly identified and thoroughly neutralized.
Every black swan event of recent decades has been predicted.
911 - Predicted
Katrina - Predicted
2008 Financial meltdown - predicted
Trump win over Hillary - predicted
Pandemic - predicted.
Also, many false positives and false negatives predicted.
The challenge is to improve the prediction process. The #1 problem is bias. Bias is accepting some predictions and rejecting other predictiios. Bias in building the model on which the prediction is based.
Look at the current AI literature on AI Artificial Intelligence helping with Coronavirus. The literatue is full of bias. The voluntary chosen bad lifestyle of certain demographic groups is intentionally avoided and ignored.
BINGO!
so does this mean I need to watch the Simpsons a lot more? :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.