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neuroblaster 4 hours ago

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.

bryanrasmussen 14 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.

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 43 minutes 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.