What Is the Fat Tail of Sharks in San Diego?

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Soth: I find very nauseating what i have seen by these large conglomerates ine in inthe approachin in. Because it's not just ion care less aboutcar abot gamo, but its noth is very small compared to the high jacking of science by scientism. 60 years after hi approached the problem, and forty some years after his nobilipris the pretence of knowledge,. we are now committing things that are a lot worse than we did before in the name of science. And this is what bothers me.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, Black Swan, and Fooled by Randomness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a recent co-authored paper on the risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the use of the Precautionary Principle. Taleb contrasts harm with ruin and explains how the differences imply different rules of behavior when dealing with the risk of each. Taleb argues that when considering the riskiness of GMOs, the right understanding of statistics is more valuable than expertise in biology or genetics. The central issue that pervades the conversation is how to cope with a small non-negligible risk of catastrophe.