A reader writes, regarding my review of The Black Swan,

I think that your view of military officers and the self-selection occuring at Taleb’s Las Vegas meeting might be less accurate than Taleb’s even though he might have accidently hit upon truth through self-selecting. As a former infantry officer, I can attest that the military officers that I knew tended to be more inquisitive, intellectually curious, and comfortable with uncertainty (at least professionally) than most of the professionals that I’ve worked with since that time (in engineering, construction, and consulting). I would argue that (at least in the US) the military makes a concerted effort to get it’s officers to think about, deal with, and live with risk and uncertainty. I remember my plebe Military Science class at West Point. One of the first things we learned was to think of an officer’s role in war as management of chaos. There is always the recognition that the unexpected can happen and much training is create that understanding. Always expect the unexpected (although literally this is probably impossible). From my experience, people outside the military tend to have very mistaken notions of military officers and military leadership in general. I remember that we had a visiting Philosophy professor when I was a senior in college. She was a pacifist from one of the UC campuses (strange to choose to spend a semester at West Point). She noted that her perceptions had changed significantly in terms of her respect for military officers as well as the creativity and intellectual curiosity of cadets (which I think she thought was out of place given the uniformity of our environment and dress). Granted however, however I might argue that these qualities exist in the general population of military officers at a higher rate than outside the military, West Point is definitely selecting for these qualities to a great extent in its professors so that they would exist at a higher level there.

I do agree with your note that even a poor plan held tentatively might be better than no plan. I think this idea was behind Patton’s quote: “A good plan executed with vigor now is better than a perfect plan ten minutes from now.” And then, there is the famous quote from Von Moltke: “No plan survives first contact” [with the enemy]. Ian Mitroff makes this point in his approach to crisis management. He seems to understand that you cannot predict the black swans but argues that contingency planning for different categories of crises along with “early warning signals” to tell you when something is amiss will help you prepare for the unexpected crisis. An example (my own) might be that a plan to evacuate New York for one stated reason (say threat of terrorist nuclear attack) might also be helpful if you needed to evacuate NY for some other reason (maybe a tsunami in the Atlantic).

My reply: I have little knowledge of the military, but I suspect that what Taleb observed may have been what you observed, plus the selection bias.