The Oil Drum

“robustness tests bury the most important variance.”

I'll disagree.

A Black Swan is something not seen by the overwhelming majority and anyone like, say, Taleb or Mandelbrot,
who point out that Black Swans are inevitable once the Fat Tail of the J Curve has been reached are sidelined.

Only when the Black Swan -Subprime Crisis, anyone,
as part and parcel of PO- is revealed does CW
acknowledge that, yes, it was there.

"Platonic 'maps' based on (Gaussian) bell-curve probability/statistical distributions (what Taleb calls the "Great Intellectual Fraud (GIF)") are like Guillaumet's map; they are (as Kapuscinski would have put it) 'map-mementos.' Platonic maps are too devoid of detail, too vapid, to serve as a useful guide when navigating a world shaped by extreme, catastrophic risk; those maps exaggerate non-dangers (like Guillaumet's 'giant' orange trees and the platoon of 'fearsome' sheep) while totally ignoring (or severely discounting) very serious dangers (like the actual mountains and platoons of hostile natives that Saint-Exupery was really worried about)."

Again. I'm saying a Black Swan is hitting us now.

We've gone over the top of the Gaussian Hubbert's Curve and it's usefulness fades with each passing day.

Because Power Law states that once we enter the Fat Tail
of the other side of the Apostosis, a non linear event-another name for Black Swan IMHO is inevitable.

To wait for it and then react will put us behind the Collapse Event.

as you Jeff should know-

"Thanks primarily to Jeff Vail’s recommendation, I have recently finished Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies."

"a civilization is a society which adopts increasing complexity as a general strategy."

We know that a Black Swan is coming.

Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens

Thanks, I was not familiar with this concept of "black swan" before. Though it does remind me a lot of Iain M. Banks idea of an "Outside Context Problem". (He used the concept in one of his novels, "Excession").

Here's a description of an OCP in Bank's own (brilliant) words:

An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.