Hacker News Reader

Comment by csours | Hacker News Reader

See also Black Swans. If you call out 200 possible Black Swan events, and 1 comes true, people will call you a genius and ignore the 199 that didn't happen.

View on HN

As a counterpoint, if the black swans are big enough, then it is possible that a 1 / 200 track record is still useful.

How so? Predictions of black swan disasters are only useful if the prediction leads to investment into preventative measures, right?

He's talking about cases in which preventative measures could be taken regarding those 200 predictions (eg. 200 asteroids with high probability of crashing into earth, maybe we could track them, identify one coming towards us, and blow it up)

Even though, they were 200, the fact that one of them was identified correctly, saved human civilization as a whole.

The point being, 1 in 200 is not a bad success ratio per se

It's a bad success ratio if the 200 predictions didn't have good explanations for why they were made, because that means they are essentially 200 arbitrary predictions. In that case, the fact that one prediction came true is irrelevant.

To put it another way: if you're making arbitrary predictions without explanations, then you increase the likelihood of a prediction coming true by increasing the number of predictions you make. But clearly we shouldn't value predictors simply based on the number of predictions they make.

As a practical matter, if somebody has a 1/200 chance of being right when sounding the alarm, by the time something actually happens I think nearly everybody will have written them off as the 'boy who cries wolf.'

I'm into paranormal stuffs and really intrigued by psychics. But i haven't found a single claim from any psychic that predicted 2020. I think they are now below El Chupra Cabra in my totem pole

Pandemics are not black swans though. They occur at predictable intervals. Taleb explicitly says they’re not black swans in his work.

The lockdowns though and their scale were totally black swans with no precedent

There 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.

The 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.

We’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-univer...

Yes, 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.

It'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

It'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.

There 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.

No 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.

Not 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.

With 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.

It's not like they had a lot of medical help to provide in those days anyway.

Leeches.

Headache to much blood, leeches.

Stomach ache, too much blood to the stomach, leeches.

No 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.

That just isn’t true. Aside from the fact that 1918 wasn’t exactly the area of “four humors”, one can’t decide that “unprecedented” falls within a convenient range for your argument.

Besides, if your argument is that precedent doesn’t exist because medical technology was different, consider that we’re dealing with exactly the problem that quarantine was designed to fix: an infectious disease that we neither have immunity nor treatment for. For this exact scenario, the precedent is both strong and relevant.

Here's Taleb on Black Swan and corona: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb2pXXUSzmI

Reply on news.ycombinator.com