Something people don’t realize about fat-tailed probabilities: We may accept to take risks with .00001 pct chance of blowing up the planet. May be OK for some. But the inconsistency is that we do serially and collectively take A LOT of “one-off” risk. If nothing happens, we may do it again. And again. Or we may take many of these at the same time. Merely allowing such action will eventually mean that we will have 100% chance of blowing up the planet.

Recall the principle, by Kolmogorov’s zero-one law, that eventually if you have a small chance of blowing up you end up blowing up with CERTAINTY; the planet has never blown up (in trillions of trillions of bounded variations over billions of years) precisely because it took close to ZERO risks of blowing up. Nothing beyond local variations.

This seriality is something to add to the precautionary principle. Some risks we should NEVER take.

via Something people don’t realize about… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Facebook.