Talk:Black swan

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What is this doing here? Taleb is a populist. Classic anti-intellectualism. http://quantapology.com/ ^{— Unsigned, by: 74.66.228.95 / talk / contribs} 2013-02-02T02:24:52 (UTC)

A blog calling Taleb boring and then posting 12 minute long videos filmed in XtraNormal is somewhat ironic. ^theist 12:25, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

The annoying bit...

...is that anyone who lives in Australia probably encounters black swans regularly, as they are a native species (and quite populous). I can't see any place to mention that in the article sadly. But the constant focus on the 'rareness' throws me a bit, particularly when I can see one just by looking out my office window. VOX^HUMANA 10:29, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

I used to live here, also known for its black swans. Don't bother going there to see them though, the town holds little else of note. Sophie^Wilder 14:51, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

. Damn you, western hemisphere bias! ^theist 11:24, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Wahhh, the snark, you're so mean

Why is everybody so intent on deleting the snark?

Okay, presuming the user looking for the film is just looking for lesbian porn might not be the most intelligent snark, but it's better than none at all! If I wanted a nice non-confrontational tone, I'd be editing wikipedia!

I won't rollback an edit again, don't want to start a war, but please think of me, or at least call me a nice whambulance with all the modern luxuries, please ?--dx (talk) 10:18, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

The Interwebz wasn't predicted by sci-fi???

I'm a bit puzzled by this claim:
"Good black swans would include the rise of the Internet, which certainly wasn't accurately predicted in science/speculative fiction even as late as the 1980s,"
because one of the blockbuster sci-fi novels of the 1980s which kicked off the whole cyberpunk genre, William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), looks to be a pretty good candidate for a sci-fi work which did envision something quite like the internet (the "Matrix") and hackers ("cowboys"), ideas which Gibson had toyed with at least as early as 1982 when he first published Burning Chrome. ScepticWombat (talk) 14:54, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Screw that, Orson Scott Card predicted that someone could take over the world via manipulating the internet chatrooms back in 1985. Maybe get enough Likes on Facebook and the UN makes you Dictator of Earth? CorruptUser (talk) 10:19, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

A Statistician's View

I'd just like to point out that the Black Swan teaches absolutely nothing that every competent statistician didn't already know. Mostly I'm pointing this out because of finding out that the author is a self absorbed twat (thanks ratwik), otherwise it was fine since pop-culture stats is sorely lacking and we get really furious that the big decisions are made by people that wouldn't know how to price a simple call option and yet turn around and try to sell a Bermudan Gap option on options with an Asian Strike (and if you have enough balls to say you have no fucking clue what any of that is, you are smarter than the average person selling it).

But here's the real kicker. The financial crash of 2007? It wasn't even a Black Swan. At all. It had happened before in the 1970's; my Grandpa worked as a lender during this time, and he had arguments with his boss. The problem then was that the banks were NEVER on the hook for making bad loans; they'd loan to someone who should never have qualified and sold the loan to some other bank dumb enough to buy it off the first bank (while the first bank got HUGE servicing fees just for the loan existing without ever holding on to the risk), and used this money to loan to someone else who should never have qualified. The Black Swan just feeds into the myth that "oh we couldn't have predicted beforehand". We didn't just "could've", plenty of people WERE predicting problems, but they were just the guys doing the math not the guys making the decision. The only real difference in the 2007 crisis was that because Glass-Steigal was gone, the banks didn't need to find other banks too dumb to be a bank, they could find mutual funds made up of even dumber people. CorruptUser (talk) 10:29, 17 August 2015 (UTC)

Whelp. If only we had a form of government that combined a meritocratic/technocratic/geniocratic administration with democratic everything-else. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 11:17, 17 August 2015 (UTC)