4 ms·
I still take it to be a little different. They aren't unpredictable in the sense of fantasy cows. They are unpredictable in that you have no prior to cause yo
by taeric 3y ago
I still take it to be a little different. They aren't unpredictable in the sense of fantasy cows. They are unpredictable in that you have no prior to cause you to expect them. Stated differently, fantasy cows are a thing that is impossible in our current understandings. Black swans are things that just don't happen. We don't necessarily have a reason to think they can't happen.
As such, you can use counter factual planning to prepare for some of these events. Interest rate risks would fit here.
This is complicated by his insistence that covid was not a black swan. As that seems to still fit the definition. That a pandemic could happen doesn't make it less impactful when it does. Would be like the expected earthquake on a fault line. Not knowing when it will come is a salient fact.
- ben_w 3y agoOoh, interest rates! Perhaps I should have used them as my example of a black swan — I'm old enough to remember when negative interest rates were "absolutely impossible and never ever going to happen". (That said: cow brains seem to be more complex than GPT-4 and LaMDA, and the latter managed to mimic sentience well enough to convince Blake Lemoine; a cow brain wired up like even a relatively mediocre LLM would certainly… be a surprise).