Who predicted the 2008 global financial crash? COVID? The war in Ukraine? Of course, some did. Hollywood gave us a taste of a global respiratory pandemic in the 2011 film, Contagion. Some economists saw the unravelling of the financial markets and the ensuing recession long before it happened. And we should all have seen Vladimir Putin's war coming. He had already annexed Crimea, he massed troops on the border for months and kept warning he would strike. But even if we should know, we often don't want to know. We certainly don't prepare. These events are what statistician Nassim Taleb…