Alright, so I redownloaded Black Swan off Libgen and have been browsing through it. Taleb is a little confusing, but looking at passages, I think roughly Taleb defines things as:

• "Black swan": extreme unpredicted events; this unpredictability can be due to models or calculations that fail to incorporate power laws of appropriate exponents, or it can be due to model uncertainty / Knightian uncertainty / closed-universe assumption

  • "Gray swan": extreme events which can be modeled by an appropriate fractal/power-law model, although they only can give very vague predictions.
• "White swan": common (not rare) events predicted by one's model, excluding the unpredicted black-swans and the possibly-predicted-but-still-rare gray swans

This overlaps with his 'Mediocristan'/'Extremistan' dichotomy; he specifically rejects there being any moral or desirability connotation to black vs white swan, other than commenting on the unfairness and randomness of black swans (whether they're either positive or negative for the affected individuals, be they J.K. Rowling or someone boarding a flight on 9/11).

I thought he had a table of recommendations including things like living in cities, but I can't seem to find it skimming Black Swan, so perhaps I saw that in some of his writings since then.

So, I guess these articles are misusing 'white swan' after all.