[yalooze]

For a slightly different take, Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. I would read some of the more direct recommendations here and then read Taleb to remind you that not everything is predictable or easily explainable.

[evjan]

The entire Incerto book series by Taleb (which includes Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan) are awesome and they are talking about big catastrophic events like the current one. This pandemic is a classic Black Swan event: it's a surprise, it has a major impact and lots of experts will try to say that it was easily foreseeable in hindsight.

[anthony_doan]

This isn't black swan. Taleb is really condescending when he try to make his point.

He really tweet fight over other statisticians about the concept of black swan when it's in the statistic. I can understand if he wants more emphasis on it but he makes it as if statistic does not take this into account.

Black swan is something that is never seen. Seeing how there were many similar viruses coming out of China and one in the middle east already means this is not a unseen or will blind side.

[pergadad]

It's not a black swan, a pandemic was long on the horizon (think SATS, MERS, Ebola, ...).

Just to add: I found taleb pretty opionated and had trouble distinguishing his own opinions from facts/theories.. I'd not recommend his books.

[cinquemb]

> It's not a black swan, a pandemic was long on the horizon (think SATS, MERS, Ebola, ...).

I agree with this statement

> Just to add: I found taleb pretty opionated and had trouble distinguishing his own opinions from facts/theories.. I'd not recommend his books.

Everyone has an opinion… but very few will step through the mathematical models (and where/how they break down) behind how they are gauging/backtesting the risk of ones assumptions (and go about figuring out how to adopt it to your own circumstances), like taleb does.

[FabHK]

Agreed on both counts.

Experts had been warning about this. See for example Bryan Walsh’s article in TIME in 2017, very explicitly titled The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic [1]. That’s not really a black swan. It was just a question of when. Note also that some countries (eg Singapore, Taiwan) are reasonably well prepared.

Next, Taleb is smart, but overrated (most of all by himself). His books can be summarised in a few paragraphs. IIRC, someone said to Murray Gell-Mann once that “nobody is as smart as you think you are” - that applies to Taleb.

[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/4766607/may-15th-2017-vol-189-n...

[katzgrau]

"a surprise for the turkey is not a surprise from the butcher."

Whether it's a black swan event depends on the perspective you're taking.

[nell]

Disagree on Taleb. He has been a major influence in how I see the world. Here are a few things he brings up often

- Value of grandmother's wisdom

- lindy effect - Most new tech will replace the tech that came before it and rarely centuries-old tech.

- Being skeptical of what we read in newspapers

- Recognize that domain experts could be idiots in other domains

[samtechie]

I think it is. Not because there were other potential Pandemics but because of the timing of the Virus. Its comes at a time when social media is in widespread use which means misinformation spreads rapidly which also leads to panic. Generally, social media amplifies everything good and bad. A combination of these factors makes it a Black Swan event.

[cambalache]

Instead of the expected pandemic when people were not going to use social media because...?

[Grustaf]

I strongly recommend reading the (relatively few) one-star reviews of his books on Amazon. Very entertaining stuff, with more substance than his books...