Gabe, I wasn't suggesting we ignore the possibility of black swans -- although Taleb's point is that you can't assign probabilities to black swans, precisely because they're unpredictable. The "most accurate forecast" of the future would precisely be the one that considered the full range of possible outcomes, with probabilistic forecasts attached to each. This seems to be roughly the way the Fed does things (although perhaps not as systematically as I'd like): when Bernanke talked about the Fed's forecasts yesterday, he said the headline number was the "central tendency" of the range of forecasts.
My point was simply that the Fed shouldn't look at the worst possible outcome, say, "Let's assume that will happen," and then make policy on that basis, which is what Felix (at least rhetorically) was suggesting.
Commenting by HaloScan
