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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

black swan is not a reference to the badness of blackness but the unlikelihood of something contradicting volumes of previous data.

Thus it can change industry in a good way or a bad way, because the black swan is unprecedented and unpredicted, its consequences and their nature is unsettled.

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Traditionally in economics black swan is an unpredictable negative event.

The only thing that is unsettled here still is how many more people will lose their jobs and how much cumulative loss prisoner's dilemma will generate.

I saw random people on Internet suggesting to piggyback this disaster and dip into the crazy money that it is "generating", but in a zero-sum game somebody has to lose.

As I understand it, it's something unpredictable and high-consequence, not necessarily negative. The origins are in Hume's problem of induction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

Unpredictable positive events usually just don't get attention. Something good just happened, okay, that's good. People just don't pay attention.

Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economical".

This is how an economist would call a disaster.

they do get attention, but generally people don't dwell on how unpredictable they were. Operation Warp Speed got covid vaccines out within ~1 year. Initial predictions were more in the >= 5 years time range. Fast covid vaccines were very much a "white swan" event, but reporting around it wasn't "this is so unlikely to have worked out" etc.

An unexpected event being "good" doesn't make it a "white swan". The historical context for black swans is that Europeans had only ever seen white swans, which were native to the Old World, and so there was assumption among them that all swans were white: the black swan in European culture was a symbol for something impossible. That is, until they made contact with Australia, and first encountered the black swan. One who had derived from induction the mistaken assumption that all swans were white was proven wrong with a single observation, and the European models and cultural symbols had to be updated.

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-rare-bird-how-eur...

An observation consistent with past observations would be a "white swan".

As a funny thing, when I first read the problem of induction and Bayesian statistics the example was white and black sheep.

As a general rule in human history unpredictable events seem negative when they happen, the greater the unpredictability the greater the negativeness seems to people when it happens because unpredictability tends to destabilize systems set up to deal with predictable things, this however does not mean that the later consequences will remain negative for ever and ever.

All that said however, probably the greatest black swan in terms of unpredictability in human history was that there were two freaking big continents in between Europe and Asia when you try to circumnavigate the globe.

on edit: probably should be "the greater the unpredictability and the more things the unpredictable event connects to the greater the negativeness seems to be", because obviously the platypus while completely unexpected affected basically nothing at all.

The description I remember is the idea of holding the belief “all swans are white” until one encounters a black swan, and having to update their beliefs accordingly. What does this mean about swans?

But maybe that’s not the intended meaning either? It’s an interesting expression.

Yes. And ultimately the colour of swans in Western Australia impacts… almost nothing at all.

.. save decisions about cycling w/out lights around Perry Lakes at night.

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