Nassim Taleb

Has Taleb's "black swan" theory finally become validated through the spread of coronavirus? Can many other modern happenings be considered black swan events as well?

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who the fuck is this retard posting about Taleb nonstop

This is unironically my first time posting a thread about him. I've posted in some other Taleb threads but never as an OP. I'm just asking a genuine question, user, relax.

it was already valid but sure

taleb is based

don't get mad because you can't into math, fat tails, phoenician anthropology, genetics, etc.

>DUUUUUDDDDEEEE SOMETIMES RANDOM THINGS HAPPEN LIKE DISEASE THATS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE OR THE LEBANESE CIVIL WAR WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT A MULTI-ETHNIC,MULTI-RACIAL, MULTI-RELIGIOUS ARTIFICIAL STATE WOULD FALL APART IM GRECO-PHOENICIAN BTW HAHA I CAN DEADLIFE 2 PL8
cool

>something unexpected happened
>does this mean that the based arab man was right all along
does it?

Examples? It's still debated. Not long ago people were arguing whether Trump's election was a black swan event versus an inevitable result of more deep-rooted issues.

What's the theory? Explain pls

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In a nutshell: There are completely unexpected events that cannot be predicted in any way - yet change the course of history forever. These events are later explained rationally in retrospect as if they were inevitable or part of a normal part of societal progression. If you are fatalistic, you might reject this theory and assume that the world we are living in would be more or less the same despite the outcomes of some of the major events of the 20th century.

You'll find this argument with World War 1 many times: some will tell you Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination changed the world forever, but history textbooks make it seem like the war was bound to happen regardless because of the developments leading up to the war.

>dude sometimes unexpected things happen lmao
wow what a visionary genius he must have been to come up with that

You clearly have no idea how people rationalise everything in retrospect. Now you have """""scholars"""""" explaining why the USSR fell, or why the 2008 crisis happened, yet they never predicted them. Humans in general overestimate their ability to predict anything. The point is, nobody acknowledges the unknown unknowns.

so if some user from iraq leaks taylor swift feet pics war would be bound to happen?
Based

>nobody acknowledges the unknown unknowns.
damn you’re right, surely they aren’t such a well-known and common cause for concern that a universally understood colloquial term for them has been in use since at least the 1950s

this, if Taleb's thesis sounds like common sense and nothing deserving of our attention remember that contemporary political economists unironically believe that future market conditions can be modelled mathematically in the same manner as a simple lottery. this is the result of autistic ramblings of von Neumann and Morgenstern. for treatment of actual real life uncertainty look into Keynes, Hayek, Shackle, von Mises and Taleb

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simpering basedboy sarcasm laden reddit prose, meme loving fuck i doubt you've ever expressed a sincere opinion in all 16 years of your life. stop posting.

You're making an oversimplication. Here are some examples worth contention:

1. The neoliberal system of free markets and trade that we use across the world today would be present regardless of the outcome of the Cold War/the fall of Communist regimes.

2. Increased diversity and immigration in Western societies were bound to happen anyways, even if WW2 turned out far differently. They are the rational outcomes of systems that were in place long before the 20th century.

3. Unexpected revolutions such as those in France and Russia did not change the course these countries would take over a much more long-term time period.

If Al Gore won in 2000 do you think we would have invaded Iraq?

No.

í have not read the book so i dont know what arguments he proposes for it, but i don't think the assassnation is a good example. It really doesnt seem unexpected if a despised heir to the throne goes to a region in ethnic tumroil (caused by the same empire) and gets killed. Political leaders get killed all the time. The war itself can be explained through all of the clusterfuck of alliances. The devastation might have been led by the inmense industrial power of the belligerents´ militaries. Additionally, Hell, Europe had been in war countless times up to that point.

You might say that everything is unexpected and we cant predict anything. Nontheless, i think we have the tendency to try to explain how things happen so we can act upon them and try obtain the outcomes we want. It's not because we just see things make sense in retrospective.

>complain about reddit posts by making a reddit post
Interesting

COVID-19 is not YET by any measure black swan event. When coronavirus wipes out meaningful portion of the human population and has long lasting global economic, political and social impact, we can start talking about black swan.

I think the idea is those "rational explanations" can be made well after the fact, but in the moment it was all rather unknowable.
The secret alliances were...secret, no one would think the archduke would be assassinated by Serbs, no one would think the next step was Germany, not Austria-Hungary escalating the war...with France... and on and on until it became Total War.

Now we look back a century later and say well DUH, it was a region in ethnic turmoil and so on, obviously it would happen! But at the time, it was rather unpredictable.

Yeah the war example came to mind because we debated it in my history class during high school, it's not something Taleb brings up. The argument you suggested that alliances, militarization, rising nationalism made the war inevitable is a strong one though, I'd probably agree.

Maybe a better example would be the Napoleonic Wars.

Do you go about your day acknowledging the unknown unknowns?

>When coronavirus wipes out meaningful portion of the human population and has long lasting global economic, political and social impact, we can start talking about black swan.

Let's assume that worst case scenario. I still disagree. Would the world be radically different today if it weren't for the Black Death or the Spanish Flu? Things eventually even out and normalize, even if it takes centuries.

the whole world has literally gone upside down because of this event,and has been covered by all media way too much, I don't think half of the world pop needs to die for it to be measure a black swan event, My grandma literally knows about it.

Example: Any black swan

>Things eventually even out and normalize, even if it takes centuries.

Maybe. The point is people underestimate the probability of tail events. Not necessarily the frequency of black swan events, but the possibility of events FAR out in the tails.

>the whole world has literally gone upside down

Kek
You haven't seen nothing yet.