How can we prepare for the unpredictable? We are already planning a trip or starting a business, or even if we are quietly fringing some potatoes at home, being Prepared to eventualities You can save us more than one disgust.
For a person on foot, and even for a company, dealing with a blackout can enter a category of “foreseeable unforeseen”: we do not know when they will occur but we know from past experiences that it is likely that at one time or another, our light will leave for a while.
However, it is likely that people in charge of managing the peninsular power Bru what this week With the same attitude. From his point of view, what happened was something never seen beforea good candidate to catalog like what we call a “black swan.”
First of all, what is that of the black swan and where it comes from. The concept was popularized back in 2007, in the book The Black Swan: the impact of the highly unlikely, written by Nassim Taleb, expert in statistics and finance. In the work as essayist of This controversial thinker The concept of uncertainty has a great weight, and the idea of black swan is perhaps the zenit of uncertainty.
We are not talking about The 2010 movie Directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Natalie Portman, nor of the animal (although the theory owes its name to this animal). A black swan is an event with two characteristics. The first is that it is a possible but so unlikely event that it is unique in its category, an event that would be unthinkable although in retrospect it could seem even predictable. The second is that it is an event of great impact, we are not talking about a currency that falls singing while we play with it boring.
The origin of the name is, we said, in the animal. And, as Taleb explains in his book, until the arrival of European explorers to Australia in the seventeenth century, for the West Swannes were white and talking about a black swan would be limited to the context of the fantastic. Everything changed with the arrival in Oceania and the appearance of dark swans.
A Clear example of such an event It would be that of the attacks perpetrated on September 11, 2001. Although on that date the kidnappings of airplanes by terrorists were not something strange, the idea of crashing these vehicles against buildings to maximize the damage caused would have been difficult to imagine. The event would not need to point it out, it also had global consequences.
The Covid-19 Pandemia also had global consequences, a global epidemic caused by a until then unknown virus could be seen as a black swan (and in fact There are those who see it like this). However, the idea of a global pandemic, even the idea that it could be caused by a respiratory virus, was not so remote and many raised it as a matter not of “yes”, but of “when.” The 1919 flu pandemic experience, or epidemics such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) not only look a posteriori As warnings, but they were already seen before the pandemic.
Prepare for the unpredictable
Taleb, an expert in statistics, explains that when we try to estimate the probabilities of an event, in general we have to rely on what we already know. For example, if we want Estimate probability that a new company Continue active A year after its creation, we can serve statistics based on companies founded in the previous years. If we want to predict if a team will win a game, we can also back and attend to the statistics of the team and the rival.
That is precisely the limitation of statistical tools: it is among extremely difficult and impossible to estimate the probability of an event that has never been given.
Well, what about the blackout? Undoubtedly, the April 28 blackout has been an event of important consequences that We will still have to evaluatethe damages caused by the cut not only the economic but probably had ramifications in other contexts. That part is out of place, the Great question Now is whether this was an unpredictable event.
We may not be able to answer this question with certainty yet since, although little by little we are going Knowing new details On what happened, it is still early to know with certainty the causes of this great blackout. As for the dimension, we can find comparable precedents if we look outside of Spain, such as the Italian blackout of 2003 either The one suffered by Texas in 2021.
However, those great blackouts were, in a certain sense, conventional. In the Italian case, the cut of a high voltage line that connected Switzerland with Italy fell, dragging with him the entire network of the transalpine country. In the case of Texas, the cold and its impact on gas electricity generation was the cause that the system could not with the demand for electricity of the southern state.
In Xataka | How to load your mobile battery when there is no electricity
Image | Quartl
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings