Risk Mysterianism and Cognitive Boosters

The philosopher George Santayana (1920) famously stated that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This suggests that history exhibits a contingent cyclicality, and its moral is that we must learn from our mistakes if "progress" is to be made (Santayana, 1920, pp.284-285). But there are some sorts of mistakes from which we cannot possibly learn; mistakes that preclude retrospective analysis. Consider the difference between (what may be called) "historically unprecedented" and "historically singular" kinds of unrealized risks: the former are general types that can have more than one token, although no such instances have yet occurred, while the latter are types that can only be instantiated once. A local act of nuclear terrorism, for example, would be a profound tragedy (as was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), but humanity would survive it. As of April 2010, just after President Obama's promising two-day Nuclear Security Summit with 47 nations, no such act has yet taken place. Until this counterfactual becomes factual, then, it falls within the "unprecedented" category. Abstract