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These are NOT black swan events. These are probably all White Swan events (possibly grey swan events, but i'd have to review stuff that i don't want to right no
by scoofy 5y ago
These are NOT black swan events. These are probably all White Swan events (possibly grey swan events, but i'd have to review stuff that i don't want to right now). E.g. High certainty, just low predictability. From the book, when you know the statistics of a rare event, and then the even occurs, it's absolutely not a black swan event.
For an event to be a Black Swan event, you literally need to have no possibly for the event in your deductive framework (e.g. the problem of induction which is what the book is actually about). In every single one of these examples, the possibly of the event occurring is accepted by everyone.
This is why Taleb lost his mind when people started calling the Covid Pandemic a "black swan event," which it was absolutely not. We know pandemics happen, we know about what power law they happen at. The fact we were not prepared at all is a problem of not being prepared for something we know will happen with certainty.
https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-government-is-bailing-out-investors-managers-not-you-3b31a67bff4a https://medium.com/incerto/corporate-socialism-the-governmen...
- PaulHoule 5y agoWhen I was doing a postdoc in Germany I would go eat mushrooms in Amsterdam and have the same trip about "exceptional events" over and over again. Than Taleb wrote that book and I wished I'd written something about "exceptional events". Then Taleb just coasted, drifted and became irrelevant.
- scoofy 5y agoLol, sure, starting Universa after basically inventing tail-risk trading strategies is definitely "becoming irrelevant."
- XorNot 5y agoWe know pandemics happen but we have no idea which viruses will become pandemic viruses - until one emerges, we're generally confident that there is not an imminent pandemic.
- lolc 5y agoAfter SARS and MERS, the risk of another coronavirus-outbreak was well established.
- XorNot 5y agoNeither of those became pandemic viruses though. And the specific year over year risk was essentially unknown until a new virus emerged at such point we had a couple of months to determine what we thought would happen. That's the specific event risk: pretty obviously if we had maintained effective pandemic response measures, and maybe focussed on general infectious agent spread control measures as a society (i.e. a year over year goal to reduce influenza cases, update building codes to require less touchable surfaces to navigate) then we'd be better off then we are.
- lolc 5y agoThe possibility of a pandemic caused by a coronavirus was well recognized before it happened.
- scoofy 5y agoWho is we? The CDC is actively watching for pandemic signals all the time. We know pandemics happen, we know their rough power law occurrences. We know the most dangerous vectors of transmission. We can prepare for them. We typically don’t. Just look at all the aging housing infrastructure on the California coast. We know there will be major earthquakes and we know how often they happen, yet the general populace cares more about how pretty the historic buildings look, even though we know they will kill people. These are not black swan events.