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I've also seen it coming for a long time and can point to every friend and relative as a reference. That whole time, for the last year and a half especially, I was always thought to be a crank. Now that it's happening, I'm a crank because it seems impossible to predict?

Remember, a black swan isn't unpredictable; it's only unpredictable to the majority. The turkey spends two years thinking the butcher is the greatest guy in the world, until the last day -- the black swan. But to the butcher, it's not a black swan at all.

I don't know about agentbleu, but I don't have evidence to support my conclusion. I only read the news and used Google. I assure you that Soros has it right and this will end up being worse than the Great Depression.

2 comments

1) Black swans, according to Taleb are not predictable. That's what he keeps repeating. He doesn't lay any claim to superior prediction capabilities. He merely says that they occur more often than people think, and invested accordingly. He does mention that some are predictable for some people, but I don't think financial markets fall into that category outside of special cases like insider trading.

2) How can people vote up and take seriously a comment like "where inflation of US dollar outstrips that of zimbabway." [sic] ? Do you really believe that?

I too vote: "not hacker news". Other sites have plenty of "doom! gloom!" stories if that's your thing.

I'd like to think that hacker news is an upbeat site. If the world catches fire, we're the guys who will be making fire extinguishers.

Perhaps it is me, but I like to think of starting a new venture to be an upbeat, positive, optimistic way of life. Observations about the state of the world or the economy are interesting only so much as they fit into startup plans, and time has shown again and again that you can run a startup in any environment.

Just my two cents.

What seems to drive a lot of these "sky is falling" stories are people's political or economic beliefs. "Look, Bush screwed up!", or "Ron Paul was right!", or "Marx called it all along, capitalism is broken!". So naturally talk soon turns to politics and economics, and you get everyone peddling their favorite weird theory, and the net.kooks who weren't really interested in startups or tech start popping up because they smell blood in the water.

That's my two cents, and why I would nuke it, and stories like it, from orbit - "because it's the only way to be sure":-) There are plenty of other places to talk about stories like this.

I agree that if you're starting a new venture and you don't have optimism, you won't get anywhere. But if you also hide from reality, you're toast as well. This stuff isn't from 'sky is falling' kooks -- it's from Warren Buffet and Jim Rogers and Paul Krugman... a long list of the great financial and economic minds. Here it's Soros. But they'll all be ignored until it's too late. People don't want bad news, just good news.

In my mind, that's why this is, actually, hacker news. A start up is a little boat. We need to know when the storm is coming earlier than others and take action: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/battening-down.html

David, the turkey and the butcher story? That's Taleb's story, not mine. And it's important because it shows that to see a black swan coming, you often have to look at things from a different perspective.

Second, sure the US dollar won't be as bad as the Zim dollar. That's hyperbole, but the truth is that it's going to get much worse before it's over. That's doom and gloom, but it's less so when you raise yourself above turkey-level and at least attempt to manage around it.

If you had neither evidence nor analysis to support your prediction, then it's hard to distinguish it from being right in a "stopped clock" sense.