Nassim Nicolas Taleb's flawed casino argument.

Randomed by Rituraj / at 10:58 PM / /

Recently while reading a book called Black Swan, which focuses on how unpredictable events have a major impact on the world and how they are purely unpredictable, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, I came across an interesting observation made by him.
He cited an actual occurrence wherein a casino's major losses resulted from events that were completely unpredictable and which fell well outside the bounds of the high tech surveillance that casinos spent millions of dollars on to prevent cheating. However, it takes a little afterthought to realise that maybe it is because of the high tech surveillance that any attempts at cheating are eliminated and hence no losses incurred from that.
His argument is similar to saying that suppose I am carrying an umbrella on a rainy day and if a car drives by splashing water on me then carrying the umbrella was meaningless. Which is absolutely flawed because the umbrella's job is to protect from the rain, which it is achieving successfully.