
On the tail risk of violent conflict and its underestimation [pdf] - lermontov
http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf
======
weeksie
Can someone explain this to me like I'm seven? My maths just isn't good
enough. I've read Pinker's Better Angels and I've read the unsatisfying
letters that Taleb wrote in criticism. Taleb seems to have a chip on his
shoulder and while he's undoubtedly an incredibly smart man, his thinking is
often sloppy when he steps outside his field.

~~~
sseefried
Seconded.

~~~
wjnc
Introduction in Extreme Value Theory [1]

[1] [http://www2.meteo.uni-
bonn.de/projekte/SPPMeteo/wiki/lib/exe...](http://www2.meteo.uni-
bonn.de/projekte/SPPMeteo/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?id=cops_2a&cache=cache&media=evt_cops2.pdf)

~~~
sseefried
Not sure that's pitched at a seven year old

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wjnc
I work as an actuary and are somewhat used to seeing calculations like these.
They often point to very large tail risks, for example in catastrophe
modelling like windstorm, or in this case violent conflict. What makes me
somewhat doubt the applicability of these models is that they often
statistically encapsulate what you already know:

Life is fragile (to borrow Talebs word). Weather, environment (think
supervulcanoes) and man itself (violent conflict, nuclear events) all have the
capacity to do enormous damage and are a threat to society.

I know it's a variation on the age old question "What's the use of
#$this_science?", but even Talebs own narrative goes into making systems
'antifragile'. You can only make systems antifragile for so far as the causes
of the fragility are understood and manageable. So for an insurer we can do
something with a 1-in-200 chance of total ruin: don't insure. A society can
take measures to build earthquake-resistant buildings. Perhaps even move away
cities from supervolcanoes.

But in case of violent conflict: What can we do to prevent the US - China war?
(To name another now trending topic [1]) Or the next black swan conflict?

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309448](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10309448)
(edit, thanks!: changed link to The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. And China
Headed for War?)

~~~
sveme
Just a side remark, I always wonder when reading about Taleb whether he was
truly the first to discover the balance between fragility and robustness or
anti-fragility. I remember some really inspiring work by John Doyle [1] at
Caltech in the early 2000s on the concept of Highly Optimized Tolerance [2]
and complexity and robustness [3], stating that natural and engineered
networks exhibit a high tolerance towards common perturbations, yet can show
catastrophic failures when encountering extremely rare events (as described by
power law distributions). Never read much about Nassim Taleb's hypotheses, yet
sounds similar at first. Has Taleb popularized a concept that got stuck in the
unpopulated wasteland between theoretical physics and control theory?

[1] [http://leecenter.caltech.edu/doyle-
res.html](http://leecenter.caltech.edu/doyle-res.html)

[2] Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed
systems, JM Carlson, J Doyle, Phys Rev E 60(2) 2, 1999

[3]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_1/2538.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/99/suppl_1/2538.abstract)

------
fallingfrog
I think the most interesting here is this line: "All in all, among the
different classes of data (raw and rescaled), we observe that 1) casualties
are power law distributed." If I understand the math correctly, power law
distributed distributions arise when there is some cascade effect, for example
cities where the biggest cities also grow the fastest. Investment income would
be another example - the more money you have, the faster it grows. That to me
suggests that what happens is that small conflicts can grow into larger
conflicts, and more importantly the larger the conflict the more likely it is
to grow bigger. I don't know what that says about how we ought to minimize the
risk of big wars - except maybe to resolve them peacefully while they are
still small conflicts.

~~~
fallingfrog
Although - now I'm going to contradict myself. Things like skyscraper heights
also follow a power law distribution, and those don't grow in any meaningful
sense. So I guess I don't know what that means. But if anyone else does,
please enlighten me.

