The three standard deviations (or three-sigma) rule of thumb / guide relies upon a normal distribution to yield the 99.7%/0.3% probability tails. Humans are terrible at gut-feel statistics and probability due to a number of cognitive biases that seem nearly hardwired into us from birth, though. And exogenous factors can distort the normal distribution. This is just the normal landscape of highly complex interacting systems, but command-and-control style leadership's coping mechanism for simplifying complexity smooths out this information into lossiness.
A lot of what people ascribe to tail risk, upon closer examination that brings out the nuances instead of smoothing it away, are not three-sigma events. They're just three-sigma for the duration of now-typically very short job tenures. Of leadership.
What we have here, is a failure to communicate complexity.
Get some Royal Dutch Shell-like cross-disciplinary Long-Term Studies-like [1] groups going on globalization, and they'll probably eventually figure out that globalization will accelerate human encroachment upon habitats, in turn accelerating introducing novel bugs into our civilization. Up until recently in the span of homo sapiens history, while we've always encroached into habitats, and ran across new infectious agents, without quick global travel they would usually wipe out a locality and leave the modified habitats intact for nearby people to take over. So the diseases would usually wipe themselves out, and seemingly "retreat" back into the well they sprung from.
It should come as no surprise that we see increasing spread of infectious agents as globalization mechanizes the modification of habitats, and swiftly moves along the disease into the Amazonion flow of worldwide travel today. And we see an increased frequency of outbreaks of both old enemies and novel vectors.
It might not come as a surprise to Sagan fans [2] that a large fraction of the US population's reaction to these complex systems is superstition and irrationality.
A lot of what people ascribe to tail risk, upon closer examination that brings out the nuances instead of smoothing it away, are not three-sigma events. They're just three-sigma for the duration of now-typically very short job tenures. Of leadership.
What we have here, is a failure to communicate complexity.
Get some Royal Dutch Shell-like cross-disciplinary Long-Term Studies-like [1] groups going on globalization, and they'll probably eventually figure out that globalization will accelerate human encroachment upon habitats, in turn accelerating introducing novel bugs into our civilization. Up until recently in the span of homo sapiens history, while we've always encroached into habitats, and ran across new infectious agents, without quick global travel they would usually wipe out a locality and leave the modified habitats intact for nearby people to take over. So the diseases would usually wipe themselves out, and seemingly "retreat" back into the well they sprung from.
It should come as no surprise that we see increasing spread of infectious agents as globalization mechanizes the modification of habitats, and swiftly moves along the disease into the Amazonion flow of worldwide travel today. And we see an increased frequency of outbreaks of both old enemies and novel vectors.
It might not come as a surprise to Sagan fans [2] that a large fraction of the US population's reaction to these complex systems is superstition and irrationality.
[1] https://hbr.org/2013/05/living-in-the-futures (two-articles-per-month-then-register-wall)
[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/carl-sagans-foreboding-of-...