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-governmen...
Than Taleb wrote that book and I wished I'd written something about "exceptional events".
Then Taleb just coasted, drifted and became irrelevant.
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.
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.
Sometimes things happen that, in order to make money or cut costs, we convinced people were impossible.
Right. "Black swan" means "a new thing we've never seen before," but of course few people go around thinking "I will never encounter a new thing that I've never seen before."