Nowhere To Run?

Amazon frequently reminds me that I have bought some obscure music and there is something that fits to the patterns. Yes I like Fred Frith's Step Across The Border and they offered me Nowhere Fred's sixth CD for music of dance. With pieces like Nowhere to Hide, Going Nowhere and Nowhere to Run.

But also messages from around the climate conference are like The sky is falling, Nowhere to Run.

This reminds me on The Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management, an article in HBR (Taleb, Goldstein, Spitznagel).

• We think we can manage risk by predicting extreme events
• We are convinced that studying the past will help us to manage risk
• We assume that risk can be measured by standard deviation
• We don't appreciate that what's mathematically equivalent isn't psychologically so

Oh yes, in quantitative finance and in quantitative climate you need to think of answering what-if questions and to get insight and reduce uncertainty do comprehensive scenario runs.

But we shall not forget: if our foundation is intrinsically flawed, if we, say, get lost in the numerical jungle, evaporate structure to a random parameter space, ... things will become horrible in interplay and Nowhere to Run.

Yes, good mathematics is not enough, but required.