Blog
Matthew Taylor
A couple of weeks ago the RSA was contacted by Rohan Silva, a senior Downing Street special advisor and asked at short notice to hold an event featuring Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The event was packed out and Rohan as chair was at pains to emphasise the powerful influence of Taleb’s ideas on Government thinking. In essence Taleb’s argument - based on a fascinating, but occasionally somewhat opaque, mixture of philosophy, statistics and metaphors - is that big systems are much more prone to catastrophic failure (or in some cases sensational success) than small devolved ones. From bankers to planners to politicians, a combination of ignorance, complacency and self-interest leads to a systematic underestimation of the inherent risk of large complex systems.