[Banthum]

Good to reference Black Swan, but Taleb would call these events gray swans, not black swans.

A true black swan is something that's basically inconceivable before it occurs. It is outside the mental model used to evaluate outcome probabilities. Black swan events include things like:

---Your enemy in a war invents the nuclear bomb and drops it on your cities (this happened to Japan in 1945)

---You are a turkey. The farmer comes, as he does every day. Instead of feeding you, he slaughters you (something which you've got no experience or conception of).

---It's 1994 and you own Blockbuster Video, a solid earning company. Then someone invents the Internet...

Biological warfare attacks are quite well-known as a concept, making them gray swans. Also in the gray swan category are asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, etc etc.

I try to spread this distinction because if we start calling gray swans black swans, that will hide from us the most important part of Taleb's argument, which is that true black swans are the most important events. The idea of the black swan is hard to keep in your mind (how do you keep in mind the inconceivable?) so it's very easy for a pretender concept to sneak in and steal the label.

[ComputerGuru]

Thank you for the correction. I truly appreciate the importance of this distinction.

[gjjrfcbugxbhf]

In that case the cause of the credit crunch that the 2007 financial crisis was a grey swan. The risk models on subprimereal estate were clearly being interrupted incorrectly...

Good to know!

[anovikov]

Nukes have also been a very well-known concept, then have been theoretically invented in 1939 and by 1941, it was well-proven that one can be made. If anything in nukes was a black swan event it was the isotope mix of reactor-produced plutonium which made detonation of plutonium bomb without a fizzle incredibly difficult - something which no one had an idea before it happened and it almost doomed the project - in 1941, making the bomb looked a lot easier than it proved to be.

It was also well-known that U.S. is the world leading scientific and industrial power, that it absorbed huge number of well-educated Jews fleeing Nazis, and it was least affected by ongoing WWII of all major powers.

So if anyone was to make a bomb it was U.S., every rational actor should have expected it to happen. Only 'if' was timing.

[nostrademons]

I think the big black-swan event with nukes was dropping one on a city. It's a pretty big mental leap from "Yes, nuclear fission is possible" to "Our enemies have achieved it in practice, turned it into a weapon, and are about to drop it on one of our cities." Even among the top physicists working on the Manhattan project, it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.

Wormholes, for example, have been theorized for decades. Nevertheless, "The earth is about to fall into a wormhole and end up in another dimension" would probably fall into the category of black-swan events.

[bluejekyll]

> it was uncertain if detonating the bomb would ignite the whole atmosphere and kill off all life on earth.

This was known before it was dropped on a city. The Trinity test happened about three weeks prior to dropping the first bomb on Japan. The second bomb was dropped with full knowledge of the potential casualties after the devastation of the first.

We Americans always justify these bombs, but really, there is no justification.

[dsfyu404ed]

>We Americans always justify these bombs, but really, there is no justification.

So you'd have volunteered to be the first wave on the beach?

[bluejekyll]

You presume that a beach landing was necessary. By this point in the war, the US had air superiority (the fire bombing of Tokyo...), and all sea lanes under control. The US had other options.

The best explanation for why the US wanted to have a swift end to the war with Japan was to deny the USSR the option of dividing Japan like was Germany.

There is no good way to justify killing civilians during the war, and it's impossible to say what would have happened if these bombs were not dropped and some other path was taken.

[Bakary]

From a purely strategic perspective, the potential to avoid a costly land invasion must have seemed much more tangible than the at the time hypothetical and uncertain PR fallout (no pun intended) that would result from use of the new weapon.

Arguably keeping the USSR out of the islands may well have caused less misery over time for the Japanese people, from the purely utilitarian perspective of looking at how populations under Soviet rule fared.

[afarrell]

Given the amount of food which Japan had been importing prior to the war, wouldn't blockading the sea lanes mean you're still killing civilians?

[aidenn0]

It really wasn't a black swan though because bombings of industrial cities were well established at that point; it is even possible that the bombing of Tokyo killed as many as the two atomic bombs combined (estimates of deaths for each have very broad ranges).

Earlier than that on the European front, there was Dresden, which killed about a third of as many that as the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Really, once the US established control of the air, they were capable of wiping out Japan's cities with conventional weapons.

[animal531]

The number of deaths can be both meaningful and irrelevant. For example, we can drop 1 regular bomb that kills 10000, or we can drop this new type of bomb that slowly eats the flesh off of 100 people, before they die very terribly (and unstoppably) a week later.

The second, just by its gruesomeness factor remains a black swan, irrespective of the number of deaths.

In the same vein the nuke might not be as deadly as all the bombings before it, but at the same time it was one new weapon (ie. a singular drop from a single plane) that did something totally new and horrific, thereby making it a black swan.