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I don't like the use of the word "predictable". I would qualify this populist uprising as a Black Swan[0], and as Taleb describes in his book, one of the commo

I don't like the use of the word "predictable". I would qualify this populist uprising as a Black Swan[0], and as Taleb describes in his book, one of the common reactions to a black swan is to rationalize it's obvious predictability after the fact. Were there logical reasons to believe this populist uprising would occur? Of course (and this paper does a good job exploring them). Was it predictable? I don't know. By and large most of us did not predict it, so I'm not so sure. Only with hindsight is this outcome "obviously" predictable. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

justicezyx 9y ago
> Were there logical reasons to believe this populist uprising would occur? Of course (and this paper does a good job exploring them). Was it predictable? Contradicting statements. Believe means somewhat possible. If you assign someone possibility then it's predicted.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  To clarify, by "predict" I mean "to be reasonably sure of the outcome before it happens". I can assign logical reasons for Uber to declare bankruptcy tomorrow, but I would definitely not predict it.
Mikeb85 9y ago
> By and large most of us did not predict it, so I'm not so sure. Please, economists have been predicting this for awhile. Read someone like Piketty, he presents a plethora of evidence that inequality is reaching the levels of the gilded age, and that era wasn't exactly devoid of strife, political change, wars, etc... The only people who are surprised are those who are too distracted by their own insular worlds to see what's happening around them.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  Taleb addresses this too. Of course somebody DID predict it. I don't know if that means the event is, in general, "predictable." If you put 1 million people in a room and told them to randomly guess what events would occur next, someone would predict correctly. The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question.
  - Mikeb85 9y ago
    > The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question. Not everyone is an expert in all fields. This is the domain of economists, sociologists and political scientists. Certainly many of them did predict this, there's a ton of data to support their theories and predictions. The problem is that if you're one of the people who are comfortable with the status quo, you're not going to be paying attention to these things, much like a labourer in the south likely doesn't care about the stock market or happenings in the venture capital markets in the Bay Area. The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class.
    - geodel 9y ago
      > The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class. I'd say they listened to experts who are ideologically like them e.g ivy league elites, the ones mostly benefitted by globalization.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
tome 9y ago
Agreed. It's predictable in the same way that the security services knew about 9-11 in advance. Yes, they had tip-offs, but they also had tip-offs about many other attacks that never happened.
DINKDINK 9y ago
I agree that we should doubt that the populism was predictable. Ex-post many people claim things could have been predictable but I would argue against this political movement as a Black Swan. The main point in Taleb's book is that Black Swans are /critically/ a result of inductive reasoning. Black Swans events are called such because black swans used to be a mythic creature that people would refer to because they had never been seen.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  Yeah, great point about the inductive reasoning. I haven't thought about that aspect too much, although I guess I would call this line of reasoning inductive: "this globalization sure is impacting people's livelihoods, and causing major economic shifts. Maybe we should slow down." "it will definitely raise GDP. Rising GDP has always led to rising standard of living. We'll be fine."
  - DINKDINK 9y ago
    The incompleteness of inductive reasoning is exemplified with The Turkey Problem: All year, day after day, the farmer feeds the turkey. The turkey concludes that the farmer is benign. The day before Thanksgiving, the farmer kills the turkey. The event that the turkey cares the most about, his death, is not in the set of evidence that he uses to make his conclusions about the state of the system. Therefore he is unprepared to handle the outcomes of the system he lives in. The political establishment had the ability to sense the effect of policy. They chose to be ignorant to it or not address it. This is not an example of Turkey Problem or Black Swan, it's more of a Ostrich Problem.
candiodari 9y ago
I would argue quite the opposite. It's not a Black Swan at all. It's an entirely predictable outcome that is caused by the incentives of large groups of people. E.g. when people say "software is eating the world", that really means software engineers, like most people reading this site, are taking away the means of existence of hundreds millions of people. In the US, but much more so outside of the US. Can you really call it a black swan when 1) you see it coming 2) it is perfectly clear what can be done (e.g. killing globalization and stopping people movement around the globe, as is being advocated, yes it's racist, yes it's going to kill GDP and in that sense "make us all worse off", but it's hard to deny that it will help. Not in the way we want it, it'll kill our access to ipads, and force inferior alternatives in many ways. But it will help) 3) you will not cooperate with preventing the black swan, even yourself, because of incentives (you would lose your job) 4) ... This "populist uprising" is a feedback loop that's just barely getting started. It is currently absolutely not worth the word "uprising". A few republicans got elected. Sorry to point this out but that won't be the end of it. It hasn't even begun. We'll need to be very lucky to avoid another war.
- geodel 9y ago
  You have made very relevant arguments. I have same opinion about happening in my country (India) where middle class by media is defined as top 5-8% of population. Anyone lower survive on most basic food and housing. But with onslaught on low end tech jobs even the sector which mostly benefited from globalization is going to get crushed there. We are indeed heading toward turbulent times in most of the world.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
It's a black swan if you take a 50% gray and round it up.
thecolorblue 9y ago
Agreed. The only things that could have been predicted are that globalization would have repercussions and that the losers in globalization would have interest in disrupting the winners. The same could be said of the next 20 years.
lettergram 9y ago
The whole idea of a "black swan" is bullshit in my opinion. In his book, nearly all events were predictable if the right people were consulted, research was done, or if people even looked at data. The problem, is the mainstream media, and even educated researchers miss the mark regularly. To me it appears most poeple assume they know better or listening to the wrong experts. That's actually the whole reason I created my startup: https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ We basically filter out the noise, and listen to experts. It works amazingly well for investing, but also predicts things like Trump winning the election. It even creates an awesome (highly relevant) news feed. I think most people just live in their bubbles and close their senses to what's right in front of them.
- pillowkusis 9y ago
  Sentiment analysis based on media is going to make you even more vulnerable to black swans. Black swans come from our collective blind spot -- if the media is reporting it (with a correct sentiment), it's by definition not on our blind spot.
  - lettergram 9y ago
    Who said we were doing sentiment analysis on the media? That's decidedly not what we're doing ;)

justicezyx 9y ago

> Were there logical reasons to believe this populist uprising would occur? Of course (and this paper does a good job exploring them). Was it predictable? Contradicting statements. Believe means somewhat possible. If you assign someone possibility then it's predicted.

pillowkusis 9y ago
To clarify, by "predict" I mean "to be reasonably sure of the outcome before it happens". I can assign logical reasons for Uber to declare bankruptcy tomorrow, but I would definitely not predict it.

Mikeb85 9y ago

> By and large most of us did not predict it, so I'm not so sure. Please, economists have been predicting this for awhile. Read someone like Piketty, he presents a plethora of evidence that inequality is reaching the levels of the gilded age, and that era wasn't exactly devoid of strife, political change, wars, etc... The only people who are surprised are those who are too distracted by their own insular worlds to see what's happening around them.

pillowkusis 9y ago
Taleb addresses this too. Of course somebody DID predict it. I don't know if that means the event is, in general, "predictable." If you put 1 million people in a room and told them to randomly guess what events would occur next, someone would predict correctly. The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  > The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question. Not everyone is an expert in all fields. This is the domain of economists, sociologists and political scientists. Certainly many of them did predict this, there's a ton of data to support their theories and predictions. The problem is that if you're one of the people who are comfortable with the status quo, you're not going to be paying attention to these things, much like a labourer in the south likely doesn't care about the stock market or happenings in the venture capital markets in the Bay Area. The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class.
  - geodel 9y ago
    > The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class. I'd say they listened to experts who are ideologically like them e.g ivy league elites, the ones mostly benefitted by globalization.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tome 9y ago

Agreed. It's predictable in the same way that the security services knew about 9-11 in advance. Yes, they had tip-offs, but they also had tip-offs about many other attacks that never happened.

DINKDINK 9y ago

I agree that we should doubt that the populism was predictable. Ex-post many people claim things could have been predictable but I would argue against this political movement as a Black Swan. The main point in Taleb's book is that Black Swans are /critically/ a result of inductive reasoning. Black Swans events are called such because black swans used to be a mythic creature that people would refer to because they had never been seen.

pillowkusis 9y ago
Yeah, great point about the inductive reasoning. I haven't thought about that aspect too much, although I guess I would call this line of reasoning inductive: "this globalization sure is impacting people's livelihoods, and causing major economic shifts. Maybe we should slow down." "it will definitely raise GDP. Rising GDP has always led to rising standard of living. We'll be fine."
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  The incompleteness of inductive reasoning is exemplified with The Turkey Problem: All year, day after day, the farmer feeds the turkey. The turkey concludes that the farmer is benign. The day before Thanksgiving, the farmer kills the turkey. The event that the turkey cares the most about, his death, is not in the set of evidence that he uses to make his conclusions about the state of the system. Therefore he is unprepared to handle the outcomes of the system he lives in. The political establishment had the ability to sense the effect of policy. They chose to be ignorant to it or not address it. This is not an example of Turkey Problem or Black Swan, it's more of a Ostrich Problem.

candiodari 9y ago

I would argue quite the opposite. It's not a Black Swan at all. It's an entirely predictable outcome that is caused by the incentives of large groups of people. E.g. when people say "software is eating the world", that really means software engineers, like most people reading this site, are taking away the means of existence of hundreds millions of people. In the US, but much more so outside of the US. Can you really call it a black swan when 1) you see it coming 2) it is perfectly clear what can be done (e.g. killing globalization and stopping people movement around the globe, as is being advocated, yes it's racist, yes it's going to kill GDP and in that sense "make us all worse off", but it's hard to deny that it will help. Not in the way we want it, it'll kill our access to ipads, and force inferior alternatives in many ways. But it will help) 3) you will not cooperate with preventing the black swan, even yourself, because of incentives (you would lose your job) 4) ... This "populist uprising" is a feedback loop that's just barely getting started. It is currently absolutely not worth the word "uprising". A few republicans got elected. Sorry to point this out but that won't be the end of it. It hasn't even begun. We'll need to be very lucky to avoid another war.

geodel 9y ago
You have made very relevant arguments. I have same opinion about happening in my country (India) where middle class by media is defined as top 5-8% of population. Anyone lower survive on most basic food and housing. But with onslaught on low end tech jobs even the sector which mostly benefited from globalization is going to get crushed there. We are indeed heading toward turbulent times in most of the world.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

It's a black swan if you take a 50% gray and round it up.

thecolorblue 9y ago

Agreed. The only things that could have been predicted are that globalization would have repercussions and that the losers in globalization would have interest in disrupting the winners. The same could be said of the next 20 years.

lettergram 9y ago

The whole idea of a "black swan" is bullshit in my opinion. In his book, nearly all events were predictable if the right people were consulted, research was done, or if people even looked at data. The problem, is the mainstream media, and even educated researchers miss the mark regularly. To me it appears most poeple assume they know better or listening to the wrong experts. That's actually the whole reason I created my startup: https://projectpiglet.com/ https://projectpiglet.com/ We basically filter out the noise, and listen to experts. It works amazingly well for investing, but also predicts things like Trump winning the election. It even creates an awesome (highly relevant) news feed. I think most people just live in their bubbles and close their senses to what's right in front of them.

pillowkusis 9y ago
Sentiment analysis based on media is going to make you even more vulnerable to black swans. Black swans come from our collective blind spot -- if the media is reporting it (with a correct sentiment), it's by definition not on our blind spot.
- lettergram 9y ago
  Who said we were doing sentiment analysis on the media? That's decidedly not what we're doing ;)