GPS, disposable razor, many of these are not impactful enough to be "black swan but good".
And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Don’t fall into the trap of reacting with “meh” to everything. Maybe you just don’t know? Maybe you don’t realise how much modern life depends on say, the Haeber-Bosch process or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Not sure if that's black swan territory or not, but IMO it was a great piece of forward-thinking that made GPS useful beyond just the original military applications.
As so often, the refinement of the technique makes it so widely available and effective that, without being revolutionary in principle, it becomes revolutionary in effect.
Telecommunications is like that. A century ago a telex from Australia to England could make it from desk to desk in under an hour. The Internet is not revolutionary in that sense. And yet it is revolutionary anyway.
I don’t know about that. Maybe it was. What I do know is that we have documented speculation about satelite based navigation the days right after the launch of Sputnik.
American scientist figured out the orbit of Sputnik independently from the Russians by measuring the dopler shift of the radio transmission with their radios. Then knowing where their radio is located they used an iterative optimisation process to identify the orbital parameters of the satelite. Immediately there they were talking about how if the orbit of the satelite were known they could use the same process backwards to fix their location. That was 21 years before the launch of the first GPS satelite.
Now, that is not exactly how GPS signals work, and with good reasons. But it is the first documented seed of the idea of satelite based navigation that I am aware of.
Source: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/...
How informative of you.
GPS does things better but we can do generally the same things without it.
Don't think about what would happen if we ripped out all GPS functionality overnight, think about what would happen if we had a decade to implement replacements.
The loss of accuracy wouldn't be that important.
> the Haeber-Bosch proces
That one's pretty great, it's probably worth including.
> or the shipping container? “Oh it’s just a metal box”, a person who doesn’t understand it might say.
Hmm, focus on cargo ships and you can see a pretty rapid revolution, but in a wider lens maybe it was more of a broad evolution. I'm not sure.
But my point was that the list was too long, not that it didn't have any valid examples.
It goes in depth on the introduction of the shipping container and how revolutionary it was. There was also a fair bit of legal wrangling to make it possible as well.
> And things like clocks and batteries were slowly refined over many, many years, so they don't fit either.
Everything started with a thought, or a discovery. What happens after is irrelevant. The event, that kicks off Dramatic Change(tm), is at the start.
> That's just a list of good inventions.
No. It isn't just a list of good inventions. Ignoring that it's not all inventions, you seem to lack the understanding of the impact. For example:
> Antibiotics
A discovery. It literally changed how humanity moves forward. One of the whitest swan moments in human history.
> public key cryptography
It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out and it changed how we exchange information, legitimize ourselves and deal with our privacy.
> contraceptive pill
The invention of the pill was an event that had massive impact on how Humanity moved forward.
> printing press
The invention of mass production of books lead to the first information explosion, dramatically changing humanity's future.
What you're doing here is mixing your ignorance of the impactfullness of some of the things on the list, with your own personal idea of what's "great", or however you want to call it.
Even if I agree that not everything on that list is equally meaningfull in terms of impact, some of them are really fucking high up the ladder, just like room temperature superconductors.
> > public key cryptography
> It took until 1975 for someone to figure this out
Sketched out in 1874 as a concept by Jevons, firmed up (sans implementation) in 1970, first implemented in 1973 (classified for nigh on 30 years by the UK Govt).
First public example (of a different schema) was 1976.
Other examples worked out in 1974, not published until 1978. etc.
I have no great quibble here, 1975 is a good approximate ballpark figure but I wasn't sure which scheme you had in mind as it's almost the only year in the 1970s that nothing particularly significant happened in public key crypto.
Clocks did not have an event that kicks off a dramatic change. We've had them for thousands of years. I don't see how anyone could disagree with that.
I could see disagreement about batteries, but even then I feel like they were quite marginal for quite a while. A slow buildup is not a "black swan but good". There needs to be quite a lot of suddenness to it all.
And I didn't even mention the ones in the rest of your post so I don't want to argue those.
If you talked about all those because I said "list of good inventions", let me clarify. It's a list of "good or better inventions", mixing ones that qualify as 'black swan but good" with ones that don't.
wat
it's called a black swan because black swans are rare. white swans are quite common. discoveries with the impact of antibiotics are extremely rare.
what, exactly, do you think the term "black swan" means. and why do you think that?
I am wondering though what exactly you think "black swan event" means and why you think that since your post here makes it rather clear you don't understand what the term refers to or where it comes from either.
Black swans are not at all rare and a "black swan event" is not called that because of the rarity of black swans. It's called that because "black swan" was at one time used to refer to non-existent or impossible things in Europe then when Australia was discovered they found out black swans are actually extremely common, a very improbable event given the data available beforehand. It's the discovery of black swans that was unlikely, not black swans, and it's the unexpectedness of their discovery that is relevant to the "black swan" metaphor. [1]
If black swans were rare seeing one would not be a "black swan event" because it would be possible to predict that one could be seen, just not very often, thus not having the required characteristic of being unpredictable beforehand. So yes, despite their post being easily understandable, the person you responded to did use "white swan" incorrectly, but your correction is just plain wrong as well.
Please if you are going to be pedantic try to also actually be correct on what you're being a jerk about first.
Lead acid got us from, what 1940 to 2005? Something like that? But the utility of Lithium Batteries has blown what was already a gigantic market even wider open.
Military without GPS would be blocked. Try navigating in jungle environments where everything is green and looks the same. I've experienced both with GPS and without, that was one heck of a game changer.
[1] https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-de...
