"The most successful investors I have ever known were steeped in market history. History didn't mean 'what's happened in the past 15 years since I have been on Wall Street' -- it meant what has happened since World War II."

The general point of the submitted article refers to a too little known principle of behavioral economics, one that has resulted in thousands of investors losing billions of dollars in the last year. Why studying history helps is that a longer time horizon provides more examples (anecdotes) of recent trends blowing up.

In general, hackers who are running start-ups have to make decisions about how to respond to economic trends, so articles about heuristics that improve rationality against cognitive biases are interesting here.

There's a limit as to how much I rely on baseball/political prognosticators for macroeconomic analysis. That said...

I think he's aiming our attention at the irrational processes by which we as a society direct our attention. Long-term possibilities are the headlined item. He also mentions our tendency to neglect low-probability (but high-impact) concerns. And of course that means "perceived as low-probability."

Those responsible for the reliability of less-macro systems like hard drives, servers, and networks have learned to have backup plans B, C, D... in place. Political and social processes, however, tend to be funded only for the best-publicized (usually the most recent) scares. Would you allow your IT department be as fault-tolerant as the SEC or other federal oversight agencies?

"There's a limit as to how much I rely on baseball/political prognosticators for macroeconomic analysis."

He's got a degree in economics and makes his living as a statistician. Not to comment too heavily on the article, which doesn't make very strong claims, but he is exactly the sort of person to rely on for (macro)economic analysis.

This article makes a very "soft" point that's hard to prove, hard to measure, and hard to make use of. What is he saying? "Be more aware that shit happens"?

Thanks, dude, but that's not useful, actionable advice - it's fluffy, unprovable, undisprovable, unactionable.. useless, basically. I'd rather see less of this kind of article on HN, so I flagged it.

"Thanks, dude, but that's not useful, actionable advice"

I completely disagree. We just witnessed an economic meltdown because far too few people took this advice, manifesting most obviously as massive overleveraging, but less obviously in many other ways.

I for one can very clearly see the actions I can take in response to this advice.

I think he is trying to say that "Be more aware about the shit that has happened in the not-too-distant-past but not recently."

Also, the parallel he draws with Perceived Risk of Economic Crash based on past data does in fact coincide with times of major shifts in our perception of risk.