I really like the genre of behavioral economics (and social psychology), and read a lot of books by authors such as Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely, Tim Harford, Malcom Gladwell, Jordan Ellenberg and many others. The problem is that they often cover similar topics, and over time blend into each other in my memory. So I thought maybe someone here could help.
Sometime in the past few years I read a book (I guess the book could have come out before that), which discussed the difficulty of predicting the particular method of the 9/11 attacks, and as a consequence warned about focusing on those methods as likely occurring in the future, and perhaps said excessive blame shouldn’t be placed on those who missed the signals, since there were countless other signals that shouldn’t have been granted attention.
I don’t remember much more than that. It’s possible the book also discussed Pearl Harbor. It’s also possible that Abraham Wald’s analysis of bomber aircraft damage (a classic case of survivorship bias), but it’s also possible that was brought up in another book, and I’m conflating the two.
Although the take over of the planes and the plot are not the same two fiction books (and maybe more) predicted terrorist attacks on DC. Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy had a commercial airliner crash into the Capitol Building killing the president and most of the government during a presidential address. Vice President Jack Ryan becomes president. Storming Heaven by Dale Brown had a 747 disguised as Air Force One try to attack the Capitol and another plane attack the White House. Both books were published in 1994.
I’m reasonably familiar with behavioral economics (a term that is getting to be obsolete, btw) and am not familiar with this subject coming up. One could predict all sorts of things happening. I’m pretty sure I heard - on a CD - George Carlin talking about how airline security checks were useless because box cutters were allowed - this in 2000. But we can predict a large number of possibilities.
I thought the issue wasn’t that this was not predicted, but when there was intelligence about a potential plot it was not given priority by Bush.
I do recall reading what the op is talking about with regard to predicting 9/11. However my recollection is that it was an article rather than a book. The gist of the piece was that it is easy in retrospect to pick the data that hinted at the final events but prior to them happening these hints were buried in enormous collections of data. Far too much to comprehensively evaluate. Here is an article about the difficulty of attempting to do such a thing: