EBOLA. You need to focus on growth rate, not number of victims –in other words the 2nd order, not first order effect, the nonlinearity.
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[Added: Something that doubles every 24 days multiplies by 37,000 every year. The doubing period is 15-20 days in Libera. So the idea proposed by Yaneer Bar Yam is to slow it down in the place of origin. You can’t rely on the medical establishment here to screen propery too risky. And you want to avoid having ebola spread out of Africa too much before the winter up North when epidemics grow faster, and avoid having consumers panicking ahead of the Christmas season as they become agoraphobic.]
[Comment: This should be familiar to people here as it is the same nonlinearity behind fragility and antifragility.Naive evidentiary methods lead people to focus on death rate which is lower than mortality from hitting one’s own furniture and deem overreaction or even concern to be “irrational”. But these rates do not grow exponentially. These are the same evidentiary idiots who refused to see financial risks in 2007. Much psychologists of risks don’t know probability and think people are “irrational” when it is the psychologists who confuse, Pinker-style, naive evidence for statistical property.]

via EBOLA. You need to focus on growth rate, not… – Nassim Nicholas Taleb.