from Hacker News

Searching for black swans

by merricksb on 5/6/25, 12:11 AM with 6 comments

• by UncleOxidant on 5/6/25, 12:34 AM

  There's not a lot there in this essay other than "Deep down, people know that something’s not right. Something feels unstable, like an earthquake that’s about to happen. But no one understands what the real danger is, or what to do about it.”

  The article that is linked in this article has the potential to be more substantive: https://www.epsilontheory.com/our-true-enemy-has-yet-to-reve... ...but it's basically an ad for a newsletter, it seems, where you have to pay $20/mo (or $200) to keep reading.

  So we're left to wallow in our uneasiness.

• by zippyman55 on 5/6/25, 1:48 AM

  It’s easy to go back in time and connect the dots and point out the now obvious black swans. Going forward in time it’s way harder, especially when we have constraints that prevent many to take significant risks. So we see the 2000, 2008 bubbles unfolding but can’t take too many risks.

• by dave333 on 5/6/25, 4:05 AM

  One of the few tools to predict black swans is Elliott Wave:

  https://my.elliottwave.com/products/free/content.aspx?id=966...

• by BJones12 on 5/6/25, 12:22 AM

  > I received my initiation into the flaws of capitalism in September of 2000... a profitable company... was suddenly trading for less than half the value of our cash on hand.

  This is no more a flaw of capitalism than finding a $20 NES at a garage sale.

• by fuzzfactor on 5/6/25, 3:02 AM

  Regular swans would be good about now, but they're getting scarce like anything else.