upvote
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.

reply
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.

reply
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
reply
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.

reply
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.

reply
Yes. And ultimately the colour of swans in Western Australia impacts… almost nothing at all.
reply
.. save decisions about cycling w/out lights around Perry Lakes at night.
reply