Comment by pergadad
6 years ago
It's not a black swan, a pandemic was long on the horizon (think SATS, MERS, Ebola, ...).
Just to add: I found taleb pretty opionated and had trouble distinguishing his own opinions from facts/theories.. I'd not recommend his books.
> It's not a black swan, a pandemic was long on the horizon (think SATS, MERS, Ebola, ...).
I agree with this statement
> Just to add: I found taleb pretty opionated and had trouble distinguishing his own opinions from facts/theories.. I'd not recommend his books.
Everyone has an opinion… but very few will step through the mathematical models (and where/how they break down) behind how they are gauging/backtesting the risk of ones assumptions (and go about figuring out how to adopt it to your own circumstances), like taleb does.
Agreed on both counts.
Experts had been warning about this. See for example Bryan Walsh’s article in TIME in 2017, very explicitly titled The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic [1]. That’s not really a black swan. It was just a question of when. Note also that some countries (eg Singapore, Taiwan) are reasonably well prepared.
Next, Taleb is smart, but overrated (most of all by himself). His books can be summarised in a few paragraphs. IIRC, someone said to Murray Gell-Mann once that “nobody is as smart as you think you are” - that applies to Taleb.
[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-n...
"a surprise for the turkey is not a surprise from the butcher."
Whether it's a black swan event depends on the perspective you're taking.
Disagree on Taleb. He has been a major influence in how I see the world. Here are a few things he brings up often
- Value of grandmother's wisdom
- lindy effect - Most new tech will replace the tech that came before it and rarely centuries-old tech.
- Being skeptical of what we read in newspapers
- Recognize that domain experts could be idiots in other domains
I think it is. Not because there were other potential Pandemics but because of the timing of the Virus. Its comes at a time when social media is in widespread use which means misinformation spreads rapidly which also leads to panic. Generally, social media amplifies everything good and bad. A combination of these factors makes it a Black Swan event.
Instead of the expected pandemic when people were not going to use social media because...?
I strongly recommend reading the (relatively few) one-star reviews of his books on Amazon. Very entertaining stuff, with more substance than his books...