The point of drawing attention to black swans is to make it clear that you can't plan your way into a situation where you've avoided all risks. So, you're right. It doesn't help much past that.
This is obvious in many areas - nobody believes we can avoid all fires, for example (or we'd defund fire departments and cancel our fire insurance).
Yet in other areas there tends to be a view that we should be able to perfectly avoid risks.
This is dangerous, because a lot of black swan events that might be impossible to avoid, can still be substantially reduced in magnitude if you apply the other main forms of risk management to a greater degree to supplement avoidance.
Even when we don't mean to, it is easy to get thrown into this pattern of reacting to a specific risk that is in our face right now rather than to address broader methods of mitigating classes of risks.
Consider if prior to 9/11, past experience with dozens of hijackings over decades had been used to consider how to reduce the potential impact of a hijacking, and there'd been locks on the cockpit doors.
It seems far more feasible that effort into investigating risk mitigation by considering possible wide catching responses to known risks (past hijackings, mentally unstable passengers, illness) could have stopped 9/11 this way, than that more effort into risk avoidance by pouring money into intelligence agencies would have led to forever preventing someone from pulling off a 9/11 type plot, for example.
This is why this idea is important. But you're right: It is just a reminder of what ought to be obvious, that we can't avoid all risks because we can't possibly predict them all.
This is obvious in many areas - nobody believes we can avoid all fires, for example (or we'd defund fire departments and cancel our fire insurance).
Yet in other areas there tends to be a view that we should be able to perfectly avoid risks.
This is dangerous, because a lot of black swan events that might be impossible to avoid, can still be substantially reduced in magnitude if you apply the other main forms of risk management to a greater degree to supplement avoidance.
Even when we don't mean to, it is easy to get thrown into this pattern of reacting to a specific risk that is in our face right now rather than to address broader methods of mitigating classes of risks.
Consider if prior to 9/11, past experience with dozens of hijackings over decades had been used to consider how to reduce the potential impact of a hijacking, and there'd been locks on the cockpit doors.
It seems far more feasible that effort into investigating risk mitigation by considering possible wide catching responses to known risks (past hijackings, mentally unstable passengers, illness) could have stopped 9/11 this way, than that more effort into risk avoidance by pouring money into intelligence agencies would have led to forever preventing someone from pulling off a 9/11 type plot, for example.
This is why this idea is important. But you're right: It is just a reminder of what ought to be obvious, that we can't avoid all risks because we can't possibly predict them all.