The Black Swan original edition.
I read it a long time ago so I donât remember many details but I found the Black Swan idea most interesting and the I disliked the authorâs biases. I took umbrage with his opinion of immigrants with accents. Both my parents were immigrants with a bit of an accent which in no way detracted from them as humans or citizens. Since I met several languages early on and I learned to imitate many accents, a skill lost over the years.
I still canât stand his public speaking. But his personality does not detract from his ideas.
The Captain
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When you define something to exclude something that you shouldnât exclude, thatâs when you get surprised by black swans.
Everyone knows that sooner or later there will be another deadly pandemic, but no one seems to know how to plan for one. The thing is, you can only plan for things that are not so far out of the ordinary that it makes sense to spend the time and money to deal with them ahead of time.
Like, if a few nuclear missiles go flying, I know there is no way I could escape from my home area afterwards, but it isnât worth uprooting my entire life and moving to a safer area.
We arenât going to be prepared for the next pandemic, and we arenât going to be prepared for World War III, and we arenât going to be prepared for an asteroid strike, even though all three are pretty much inevitable. We arenât even prepared for climate change, and that is already happening.
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Thatâs been happening since the Earth came into existence 
The Captain
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So have wars, pandemics, and asteroid strikes. And we donât prepare for any of them.
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While itâs true that no one can plan for every contingency or for any event, especially one such as a global pandemic, there was a basic pandemic plan in place at the executive level in 2016 (that took many of its queues from the Ebola outbreaks in Africa).
That plan had been abandoned by 2020, again at the executive level.
Pete
True. But I canât comment on that one without getting into politics. But If I were to comment, it would have something to do with tribal loyalties and irrational side-taking.
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To me Black Swan is about events so unlikely that they are often ignored.
The point is they do happen occasionally and results can be devastating.
A typical example is global nuclear war. Do you have a plan in place for that event?
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That is one thing you actually donât need a plan for. 
Pete
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If that happens and we survive the first hour (unlikely, since we live 7 miles from the center of D.C.), we will hide in the basement for 2 weeks. We will probably die during those two weeks. If we donât, weâll be improvising along with everyone else. Thatâs the current plan. There is not much point in having more plan that that, unless you live in New Zealand or some such place.
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Well now I am confused as I thought you were defending Talebâs categorization of Black Swans. In an interview, Taleb states the Covid pandemic was not a Black Swan.
The coronavirus pandemic, however, is not a Black Swan for Taleb, who believes that there was sufficient historical precedent to foresee the next pandemic.
Apparently like beauty, Black Swans are in the eye of the beholder.
Makes my point. IMO, what makes a Black Swan event is the unpredictability of when it occurs rather than it being inconceivable. The financial markets did not expect WWI to begin in 1914, but I think most Europeans believed there was a significant risk of a major conflict during that decade. Something similar occurred with the 2008 stock market crash. The likes of Jeremy Grantham and Robert Shiller presented compelling evidence during the previous decade that there were dot.com and real estate bubbles ready to burst. Investors knew the risks of a major market correction but because the timing of the event was unpredictable, too many stayed in too long.
No need to be confused. Taleb has/had information that I lacked or considered. Not really data but "belief,â interpretation of the data.
who believes that there was sufficient historical precedent to foresee the next pandemic.
The difficulty is access to and interpretation of the pertinent data. The difficulty is that unlike classical physics, complex systems donât have rock solid laws but instead emergent properties. Classical physics does not breed black swans. I stress âclassical physicsâ because with the discovery of the uncertainty principle things got a lot more complicated. Particle, wave, or both? Location of electrons?
Recently I watched a video about entropy that explained it as a statistical event, the higher the probability the more likely the outcome. Entropy has a higher probability than does order, as simple as that! This is interesting because AI does not produce perfect answers, just the most probable ones. Same as human intelligence which needs to verify scientific theories or postulates via the scientific method, one of humanities most significant inventions. The scientific method is what distinguished science from religion.
Talebâs conclusion about Covid not being a black swan is religion, a belief, as is mine, because I doubt there is a method to prove either one of us right. On the other hand, Talebâs conclusion about the Great War being a black swan has more credibility since it was based on data extracted from prewar news articles. We need to learn to live with uncertainty.
This has been a fascinating discussion!
The Captain
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An additional difficulty is that most of this statement is incorrect. âComplex systemsâ are not an exception to âClassical Physicsâ as they are entirely consistent with the laws of physics. They just cannot be understood through reductionism, i.e., breaking down to smaller parts. And emergent properties do not require complexity. The action of a committee often cannot be predicted by knowledge of each individual member. The interactions within the committee also matter. And the question of whether WWI is a âBlack Swanâ has little to do with quantum mechanics.
The problem I have with Taleb is that despite being a mathematician he has only provided a social science type of definition for what makes a Black Swan. As a result, it is virtually impossible to consistently characterize events like WWI or a pandemic in terms of bird colors. So the uncertainty has nothing to do with Schrodinger. This is about language and definitions. For example, Taleb doesnât tell us how much of the population needs to be clueless about an event for it to be a Black Swan. Is a majority sufficient or does it have to be 99.7%? We disagree about Black Swans because we are uncertain about the definition. That one is on Taleb.
Where I differ with you and many others here is that I believe a Black Swan event can be anticipated, at least in general. To live in Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries and not anticipate a European war would have been pretty naive. In fact, I think every one of the events Taleb calls a Black Swan was anticipated by a significant fraction of the population. What makes a Black Swan is the unpredictability of when the event occurs and how long it takes to recognize that the event is occurring. Everyone in LA anticipates a devastating earthquake, but when the Big One finally occurs it will effectively be a Black Swan because the timing was unexpected.
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Agree. In a sense everything is a complex system, all made up, step by step, by emergence from the most basic particles. We are just not smart enough to backtrack all the way to the Big Bang via reductionism.
The lack of prediction of an event is what defines it as a Black Swan. That puts Black Swan in the realm of social science.
How many people have to predict the event to disqualify it from being a Black Swan. What if one person predicts it but tells no one? Does one hand clapping make a sound? If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there, what sound did it make?
Social science is fuzzy.
The Captain
Itâs difficult to label virus invasions from afar as Black Swans per se. They are in fact reasonably frequent. Sars, ebola, bird flu are recent examples in the news.
Maybe one every five years is typical. Covid is unique in that it spread rapidly and proved difficult to contain. Spanish flu from 1920 and polio epidemic of the '50s come to mind as similar in impact.
Immunologists often warn of the potential for disaster when new virus first appears. Fortunately most are far less severe than feared. But that leaves decision makers and the public with little experience on how bad it can be.
Black Swan is ignoring severity potential.