As the Latin sayings: cineri nunc medicina datur (one does not give remedies to the dead) or post bellum auxilium ([one must not] send troups after the battle).
Never cross a river that’s 4 feet deep on average: As we saw, risk management (or policy making) focuses on tail properties not the body of probability distributions. For instance, Holland has a policy to calibrate their dams not on average height of sea levels but on the properties of the maxima — all it takes is one mistake to cause a disaster.
Science is not about safety: Finally, science is a procedure to update knowledge; it can be wrong provided it produces interesting discussions that lead to more discoveries. But real life is not an experiment. If we used a p-value of 0.01 or other method of statistical comfort for airplane safety, no pilot would be alive. For matters that have systemic effects and/or entail survival, the asymmetry is even more pronounced.
Source: https://forecasters.org/blog/2020/06/14/on-single-point-forecasts-for-fat-tailed-variables/
