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Pandemics are not black swans though. They occur at predictable intervals. Taleb explicitly says they’re not black swans in his work.
by claudeganon 6y ago
Pandemics are not black swans though. They occur at predictable intervals. Taleb explicitly says they’re not black swans in his work.
- ls612 6y agoThe lockdowns though and their scale were totally black swans with no precedent
- claudeganon 6y agoThere were widespread lockdowns during the 1918 pandemic and quarantines are a practice about as old and storied as urbanized human settlement. They’re not black swans any more than the pandemics themselves. Taleb has also talked about this quite a lot recently.
- icedchai 6y agoThe voluntary shutdown of almost all major economies was definitely unexpected. Nobody alive today has ever witnessed anything like this, on this scale, before. You can debate the academic definition, but it's definitely a black swan in my book.
- claudeganon 6y agoWe’re not talking about academic definitions, but explicitly what the guy who invented the concept has said and how he’s used that understanding. Again, in his book, he says that pandemics are not black swans. Taleb used this knowledge to advise a fund that saw massive returns betting that all of this would happen: https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/taleb-advised-universa-tail-risk-fund-returned-3-600-in-march https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/taleb-advised-univer...
- icedchai 6y agoYes, the pandemic itself is not the "black swan." Pandemics have happened before. But none of them caused a reaction like this. None of them caused voluntary shutdowns of all the world's major economies at the same time.
- klyrs 6y agoIt's predictable if you think about it for a few minutes. 1. It's hard to keep outbreaks localized, thanks to widely available air travel -- that's pretty new compared to 1918, but extremely common knowledge. 2. The standard procedure, for centuries now, has been lockdown / quarantine. 1+2=widespread lockdowns
- Fricken 6y agoIt's the way the whole western world responded in lockstep. And then did it again in solidarity with BLM. Marshall MacLuhan in the 1960s predicted that with the rise of "peer to peer electronic media" we would all be marching to the beat of the tribal drum. Here we are.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoThere were widespread closures of public accommodations, but there were no efforts made in 1918 to keep people from going outside or stop them from visiting friends and family.
- ashtonkem 6y agoNo precedent within living memory is not the same as no precedent. Aside from 1918, the quarantine of entire cities and counties has been a common tactic to control plagues from bubonic to yellow fever. There are even reports from the Black Death of some Italian cities delivering food to peasants to encourage them to stay home.
- noir_lord 6y agoNot to mention the draconian quarantine of merchant vessels entering/leaving ports. 30+ days mandatory quarantine wasn't unusual. The word Quarantine traces it's roots back to quarantino (40 days) and those laws where passed all over the place from (what we know) the 14th Century.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWith the expectation that if the ship is infected, everyone on it will die, and no medical help will be given. Pretty brutal by modern standards.
- ls612 6y agoNo precedent since the days of medicine being about the four humors of the body may as well be no precedent at all given how different the world is.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
- seesawtron 6y agoHere's Taleb on Black Swan and corona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI