Comment by littlestymaar
10 hours ago
> Covid was a black swan event
I beg to differ. Epidemiologists and public health planners always knew such a pandemic would happen eventually. In fact, it wasn't even surprising that it came from a coronavirus as this virus group was the most likely contender with the influenza family.
The only open question was when. We dodged the bullet several times over the past two decades with SRAS, H5N1, MERS and H1N1 (notice, two influenza and two coronaviruses), but one virus slipping through was definitely the most likely outcome.
And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
Sure, all probabilities go to 1 over a large enough time span. I don't think there's anything useful you can do with that information. Being early is the same as being wrong.
Ah, so an asteroid obliterating NYC is not a black swan event because it's statistically likely to happen over long enough time horizons?
If you can forsee the event, but not predict the time, it's just as bad as an even you cannot forsee.
Exactly. The only thing that could be considered a black swan event is something foreshadowed or predicted by no one ever, even in fiction.
If all rivers suddenly turned to wine and killed all the crops? Not a black swan event, water gets turned to wine in the bible.
As you can see this attitude makes the phrase "black swan event" very useful.
That would be a burgundy swan event.
That's a grey swan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_swan
>> The only open question was when ... >> And I can confidently tell you: it will happen again.
If you can't tell us when, your predicition is useless.