Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged trands

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Javier E

Opinion | Admit It: You Don't Know What Will Happen Next - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-panic.html

prediction black swan trands

shared by Javier E on 27 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • What I do regret about my virus column, though, is its dripping certainty. I wasn’t just pooh-poohing the virus’s threat; using the history of two other coronaviruses, SARS and MERS, as my guide, I all but guaranteed that this one, too, would more or less fizzle out.
  • In retrospect, my analytical mistake is obvious, and it’s a type of error that has become all too common across media
  • My mistake was that I hadn’t properly accounted for what statisticians call tail risk, or the possibility of an unexpected “black swan” event that upends historical expectation.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • unwarranted certainty, and an under-appreciation of the unknown, might be our collective downfall, because it blinds us to a new dynamic governing humanity: The world is getting more complicated, and therefore less predictable.
  • Yes, the future is always unknowable. But there’s reason to believe it’s becoming even more so, because when it comes to affairs involving masses of human beings — which is most things, from politics to markets to religion to art and entertainment — a range of forces is altering society in fundamental ways
  • These forces are easy to describe as Davos-type grand concepts: among others, the internet, smartphones, social networks, the globalization and interdependence of supply chains and manufacturing, the internationalization of culture, unprecedented levels of travel, urbanization and climate change.
  • their effects are not discrete. They overlap and intertwine in nonlinear ways, leaving chaos in their wake.
  • In the last couple of decades, the world has become unmoored, crazier, somehow messier. The black swans are circling; chaos monkeys have been unleashed
  • there is some controversy about the thesis that black-swan events are increasing due to global complexity, and the claim is difficult to prove empirically. But there is theoretical backing to the idea that more-connected, complicated systems lead to more surprising, unexpected outcomes.
  • the claim makes sense intuitively, too. For instance, increased global connectivity is one of the reasons Covid-19 has been so hard to contain.
  • the growing unpredictability of human affairs is clear in the number of surprises we seem to be enduring lately. What was the 2008 financial crisis if not an out-of-the-blue event that stymied most prognosticators? Or, for that matter, the election of the first African-American president, America’s hyper-fast flip on gay rights, Brexit, Trump’s election, or the rise of Bernie Sanders?
1 - 1 of 1
Showing 20▼ items per page