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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neuroblaster 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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bryanrasmussen 18 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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tomjakubowski an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	neuroblaster an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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joenot443 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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andyferris 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	defrost 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		.. save decisions about cycling w/out lights around Perry Lakes at night.