[neuroblaster]

Unpredictable positive events usually just don't get attention. Something good just happened, okay, that's good. People just don't pay attention.

Technically black swan might not be negative, but for all practical reasons, "black swan event" is what people call impactful unpredictable negative events and they expect those events to be negative. In other words, it is a synonym for "a disaster" of sorts, only "economical".

This is how an economist would call a disaster.

[mswphd]

they do get attention, but generally people don't dwell on how unpredictable they were. Operation Warp Speed got covid vaccines out within ~1 year. Initial predictions were more in the >= 5 years time range. Fast covid vaccines were very much a "white swan" event, but reporting around it wasn't "this is so unlikely to have worked out" etc.

[tomjakubowski]

An unexpected event being "good" doesn't make it a "white swan". The historical context for black swans is that Europeans had only ever seen white swans, which were native to the Old World, and so there was assumption among them that all swans were white: the black swan in European culture was a symbol for something impossible. That is, until they made contact with Australia, and first encountered the black swan. One who had derived from induction the mistaken assumption that all swans were white was proven wrong with a single observation, and the European models and cultural symbols had to be updated.

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-rare-bird-how-eur...

An observation consistent with past observations would be a "white swan".