I agree that this is true for large-downside events, which is why the second half of the post exists. In reality, long-tail problems mostly don’t come from black swans; magnitude of events is bounded. Rather, long-tail problems come from large numbers of unrelated rare events—i.e. corner cases—any one of which has significant but bounded consequences. It’s the aggregate frequency of individually rare events, rather than the magnitude of the events, which makes the long tail an issue.
(Though there are exceptions to this, most notably in X-risk. There, it really is the magnitude of individual rare events which matters.)
I agree that this is true for large-downside events, which is why the second half of the post exists. In reality, long-tail problems mostly don’t come from black swans; magnitude of events is bounded. Rather, long-tail problems come from large numbers of unrelated rare events—i.e. corner cases—any one of which has significant but bounded consequences. It’s the aggregate frequency of individually rare events, rather than the magnitude of the events, which makes the long tail an issue.
(Though there are exceptions to this, most notably in X-risk. There, it really is the magnitude of individual rare events which matters.)