I don’t think the author understands what a ‘Black Swan’ is. Thery are surprises. Nothing in that list hasn’t been discussed ad nauseum for years.
They aren’t surprises to the well informed, but that’s just a faction of the people, look at some of the comments already posted on this thread, by people who claim to be conservatives and yet clearly have their head buried in the sand.
Many will fall to what is called Normalcy Bias, a mental state many people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
How many Jews do you think went all the way into the gas chambers never fully realizing what was happening?
There’s a good article about it in my Preparedness Manual, which can be downloaded here for FREE:
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, a extra couple changes of oil and filters for your car, tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Or as the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.
NIV Proverbs 22:3
Lastly this for the doubters and the scoffers.
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger.
Underestimation can be fatal.”
“I don’t think the author understands what a ‘Black Swan’ is. They are surprises. Nothing in that list hasn’t been discussed ad nauseum for years.”
I completely agree. A black swan event is, by definition, an event that is not anticipated, not discussed constantly nor on the radar.
These events are often discussed only in very small circles, normally initiated by an individual who has a premonition/precognition about some dark event looming in the near future. The examples of dark swan warnings range thru all recorded history up to the analyst who tried to alert the SEC about the Madoff scam.
The most common of all dark swan events in the fullness of human history is the unexpected population event called a “bottleneck”.
For those of you who are not opposed to a bit of heavy science reading, there is such a discussion ongoing on this forum. You might find it interesting.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2820204/posts
This is “sort of” a novel black swan. In the space of one hour, something gobbles up the entire internet. Just makes it go haywire, FUBAR, you can’t get on anywhere to even discuss what the hell just happened? Then the infrastructure systems that tie into the net start going haywire, and at the end of the day, power is going out in cascades, water systems don’t work, planes can’t fly....
And nobody even knows what the hell caused it. It just “is.”
Although there is no substitute for actually reading the book, the next best thing is to see the author's actual words. From te Kindle Second Edition
What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird).
Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
** The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan. Note that, by symmetry, the occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one.*