/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14923224]

Why didn't we listen?

[Anonymous No.14923253]

>>14923224
The coronavirus isn't a black swan

[Anonymous No.14923278]

Because it is virtually impossible to plan effectively for every improbable event and still have a system that works regularly in normal times.

[Anonymous No.14923321]

>expect the unexpected
woah, who could have ever thought that one up

[Anonymous No.14923329]

>>14923278
It is, see how well South Korea and China are doing. Life is back to normal on those places.

[Anonymous No.14923335]

>>14923253
lol
It is, it falls under every black swan condition. It’s a major event that caught the world by surprise and will be rationalized in the future by brainlets.

[Anonymous No.14923342]

>>14923335
>It’s a major event that caught the world by surprise
Not really, this flaw of globalism has long been known. One can only hope for a proper plague to start spreading.

[Anonymous No.14923348]

>>14923329
Pandemics have been a thing for all of human history. Pretty sure its not some unknown event that we didn't have any idea how to handle

[Anonymous No.14923368]

>>14923329
South Korea still gets more cases per day than almost every other country. Only China was able to slow it down to a near halt

[Anonymous No.14923374]

>>14923342
It doesn’t matter, look at how the markets were functioning before the crisis. They weren’t expecting anything but the usual BUY BUY BUY IT CAN ONLY GO UP LADS

[Anonymous No.14923521]

> Bad, unexpected things happen some times.
How is this a profound insight?

Do you think that if state leaders read his book, they would have prepeared for any possible crisis that can occur at any possible time?

[Anonymous No.14923568]

Why didn't we listen?

[Anonymous No.14923573]

>>14923374
Except everyone has been waiting for recession for years now

[Anonymous No.14923585]

Why didn't we listen?

[Anonymous No.14923601]

>>14923278
Localism. The same reason big companies die, they lose flexibility and they become sluggish in a rapidly changing world.

[Anonymous No.14923620]

>>14923253
He said himself it's a grey swan. A known unknown. Black swans are unknown unknowns. Everyone was expecting pandemic "disease X" at some point. Most governments have contingency plans for surprise pandemics.

[Anonymous No.14923629]

>>14923620
>He said himself it's a grey swan. A known unknown. Black swans are unknown unknowns. Everyone was expecting pandemic "disease X" at some point. Most governments have contingency plans for surprise pandemics.
This is how stoners talk. And you wonder why we all laugh at you talebcucks

[Anonymous No.14923630]

>>14923629
Oh no, Anon over at /lit/ is laughing at me.

[Anonymous No.14923634]

>>14923253
This. It's honestly surprising a worse and more lethal disease has not been spread due to mass transit (mistake), air travel (mistake) and urbanisation (mistake).

[Anonymous No.14923635]

>>14923630
And yet here you are shilling on /lit/ and pretending like you don't care that we mock you
Cuckest cuck

[Anonymous No.14923641]

I wonder if whoever is forcing this terrible author is the same faggot who forced guenon. Fuck off, nobody cares.

[Anonymous No.14923642]

>>14923335
>It’s a major event that caught the world by surprise and will be rationalized in the future by brainlets.
I hate that you make my cite Bill Gates of all people, but this is in no way unforseen.

https://youtu.be/6Af6b_wyiwI

[Anonymous No.14923656]

>>14923335
>It’s a major event that caught the world by surprise and will be rationalized in the future by brainlets.
I hate that you make my cite Bill Gates of all people, but this is in no way unforseen.
E.g. this is a 2015 talk about flu-like pandemics btw., he basically lists issues and happenings like in a playbook

https://youtu.be/6Af6b_wyiwI

[Anonymous No.14923661]

I love how in every single Taleb thread not one anti-Taleb poster engages with him or other posters on his own merit. It's always straight to ad hominems. Looks pathological to me.
>maybe if I call them cucks one more time they'll realize the error of their ways!

[Anonymous No.14923705]

>>14923573
Yes we get it, you're smart and knew this was coming and nothing Taleb has told you has been of any value. We know you're smart and had it figured out before anyone else gave you the answer. Okay? You're uniquely smart and are now given credit for it.

[Anonymous No.14923707]

>>14923661
I read black Swan when I was a kid. I know the math and peeked at his academic papers and then seem to be normal math papers (i.e. its solid, he know math and theory.)
I'd be sympathetic towards him and I like to think I don't argue against his propositions in an ad hominem way, but his personality makes it hard for me to be sympathetic towards him. He seems like the kind of guy who'd make being around him unpleasant till you played the game and established some man-man dominance relation with him - and he won't give you an easy time. You know what I mean?
He's just too bossy, and not in a nice grizzly papa bear kind of way, for me to sympathize with him.
That's one point.

And with his arguing, it's similar with the 2010's atheist/rationalist youtubers. They taught themselves how a logical argument and conclusion looks like, and they will say good things, but in the end they don't actually understand the base of their framework, think you can just extend a Decartian method on a postulated true material world and think their argumentation is axiom-free and unshakable. The obnoxious end of those people is a Stefan Molyneux who takes something he doesn't like (be it the government, welfare, or border politics, or any moral notion) and talk themselves into the idea that their position is the necessary conclusion of axiom-less logic and rationality.
Taleb is better than that in topics where some aggregation of empirical data has been gathered, but he's still conflating his statistical propositions with the validity of his politics.

[Anonymous No.14923720]

>>14923641
Taleb and Guenon have both been 4chan canon for years now, close to a decade for Guenon. Maybe you're a newfag.

[Anonymous No.14923768]

>>14923368
China was literally welding people inside of their homes lmao.

[Anonymous No.14923784]

>>14923720
>he hasn’t been lurking long enough to remember how the guenon meme was forced

[Anonymous No.14923824]

>>14923707
cool story bro

[Anonymous No.14923830]

>>14923720
Thats true but people have been memeing Guenon more in the past year

[Anonymous No.14923837]

>>14923768
People suspected of being infected which is also legal in the west. Meanwhile you have people in the US claiming they are sick filming themselves walking around in public

[Anonymous No.14923856]

>>14923224
It's a midwit philosophy that sells itself too much to be considered by a self-respecting person. Go discuss that shit at a suitable place (you know which one).

[Anonymous No.14923862]

>>14923224
Because we have primate brains and trying to think of every thing that could go wrong or right with perfect impartiality every day is too exhausting for us. We are not built for advanced societies.

[Anonymous No.14923906]

>>14923224
OP should have read pic first

[Anonymous No.14923919]

>>14923335
>It’s a major event that caught the world by surprise
That's what they want you to believe.

[Anonymous No.14923926]

>>14923862
> We have built advanced societies.
> We are not built for advanced societies.
I'd call that simply laziness and doomsaying. In addition, lack of historical perspective that makes you think “modern city” is oh-so-much-different from Greek polis.

Humans are not defined by flesh. To be human is to become human. Broad discussions of “primate brains” can instantly be dismissed as an excuse to skip those higher levels of self-study. A lot of people on Earth still can't read and write, but it's not smart to use that example to explain that our fingers are not that suitable for pens.

[Anonymous No.14923935]

>>14923224
>>14923906
I tried reading quite a bit of NNT but he just makes the same points, ie. criticisms of economists and other people who don't account for improbable but catastrophic events.

Does he actually have any advice for DEALING with black swans?

[Anonymous No.14923944]

>>14923935
>Does he actually have any advice for DEALING with black swans?
yes.

[Anonymous No.14923956]

>>14923935
Just do whatever China did. Treat it like an actual emergency situation

[Anonymous No.14923957]

>>14923926
By advanced I meant technologically, not organizationally. As we become increasingly dependent on technology, our society becomes more scalable in the sense that single events can hold more influence than all that came before them. We are built for stability and making inferences from stable conditions.

[Anonymous No.14923971]

>>14923620

It's true. Source: I worked on an enterprise risk project for a major financial institution and one of the potentially risk events we considered was a severe global pandemic. It is really not something completely unknown or without precedent

2008 was more of a Black Swan because the mechanism through which it occurred was completely unknown. It also affected the economy and markets more than this will

[Anonymous No.14923990]

>>14923935
read more
or get audiobook

[Anonymous No.14924023]

>>14923957

Not to mention that as technology advances, our skills become increasingly specialised and compartmentalised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joXYA_4T58g

[Anonymous No.14924101]

>>14923956
Is this a joke? China first tried to pretend nothing happened and silenced anyone warning others. This was the main reason we're even in this mess right now. Then it attempted to save face by "building a hospital in 10 days" while keeping the growing number of infected people in Wuhan. Then it completely shut off the entire region, cut off its food supply, and made millions of people starve to death. Now it is claiming the spread has completely stopped even though more than a million people in Wuhan have disappeared.

[Anonymous No.14924138]

>>14923634
holy based.

[Anonymous No.14924140]

>>14923990
I think I've read quite a bit... As it stands, the main ideas that I've read about are:
1. Markets are complex, nonlinear systems that are impossible to model accurately
2. We improve by tinkering, as opposed to designing from scratch
3. The past doesn't tell you anything about the future
4. People like to creative narratives based on past events, but nobody actually knows why things happened (e.g. why WW2 stared)
5. Black swans are a thing
6. We are irrational and it's okay to make decisions based on emotions instead of shitty models
7. Antifragile systems improve under stress

I'm not saying that these are bad ideas (in fact, I think everybody should be aware of them) it's just that I can't really stomach another 100 pages of this guy's writing. It's insufferable. I'd put up with it if I was learning a lot more, but it's pretty repetitive.

What am I missing?

[Anonymous No.14924163]

>>14923634
t. Idiot hick who lives in a shithole

[Anonymous No.14924192]

>>14924101
Yikes, imma need a source on any of that

[Anonymous No.14924196]

>>14923620
>Black swans are unknown unknowns.
So the existance of a black swan is not a black swan

[Anonymous No.14924229]

>predicted the predictions
>even looked like a black swan
About 2000 years too late, Taleb.

[Anonymous No.14924264]

>>14923253
>>14923278
>>14923321
>>14923342
>>14923348
>>14923521
>>14923585
>>14923629
>>14923641
>>14923656
>>14923784
>>14923824
>>14923856
>>14923862
>>14924192
The state of this board.

[Anonymous No.14924283]

>>14924264
Your IQ isn't high enough to post here.
Scamper off, now.

[Anonymous No.14924299]

>>14923956
>>14924101
China has no transparency, we don't really know what they did or didn't do. We can criticize them for that anyway.

Pretty much every other country in the world is actually at fault for not reacting in mid-January at the very latest.

[Anonymous No.14924315]

>>14923957
There's a group of ancestors who would argue about single events — getting drought twice in a row, having an outbreak of infection that couldn't be treated without antibiotics — having influence on their lives.

You are still aiming at the wrong direction, and thus search for possible targets there. The question you should ask is not why exactly the world is bad — it is never good enough — but what should be done in these conditions.

[Anonymous No.14924333]

>>14924192
Can't get past spam filter with all these links so I've pasted my comment here
https://pastebin.com/JpQQDWK8

>>14924299
If they react early and it's a false alarm they're idiots for wasting resources
If they react late and it turned out to be real they're idiots for not acting early

It's impossible to predict when something will actually turn out to be a thread and we do not have the resources to just assume everything is an existential threat

[Anonymous No.14924339]

>>14924333
>>14924299
>>14924192
This video explains everything

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLp8CHeKQkI

[Anonymous No.14924397]

>>14924196
>So the existance of a black swan is not a black swan
Duh.

[Anonymous No.14924409]

>>14924140
>I'm not saying that these are bad ideas (in fact, I think everybody should be aware of them) it's just that I can't really stomach another 100 pages of this guy's writing. It's insufferable. I'd put up with it if I was learning a lot more, but it's pretty repetitive.


>What am I missing?
A brain and functioning testicles, you stupid feminine imbecile.

[Anonymous No.14924464]

>>14924192
Do you type like a faggot on purpose or does it come naturally

[Anonymous No.14924472]

>>14924140
>nobody actually knows why things happened (e.g. why WW2 stared)
Does he actually say this? WWII as an example?

[Anonymous No.14924538]

>>14924409
Low signal to noise ratio, just like your posts.

>>14924472
World War I, not II, but as if this fucking makes a difference.

[Anonymous No.14925092]

>>14924538
Where's he say it?

[Anonymous No.14926076]

>>14923335
it is not a black swan. it is certainly a fat tailed event for high we are clearly unprepared. more a grey swan. not a black swan. a flu like pandemic is not unknown.