The world should think better about catastrophic and existential risks
Why do people say Covid was a black swan event? It was not, it was utterly predictable, if not the specific virus, then at least the course of its spread. The black swan is our collective ineptitude in handling the crisis, not the virus itself.<p>We’ve had pandemics repeatedly throughout recorded history and before. It’s not as though the world went “a virus what is this we’ve never seen anything like it”.<p>The black plague, the flu of 1918, and numerous other examples of epidemic diseases have struck down multitudes over thousands of years. Even Sars was just a score of years ago.<p>We were simply inept when it came to Covid-19. We dropped the ball. The thing about Covid isn’t how unexpected it was, it’s how utterly predictable it has been at every single turn.