Living in a Black Swan World

I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan in between journal articles. Boston Boomer and I picked up on this book and honed in on the theory earlier this year.   A Black Swan moment or event is large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare.  The event is unexpected because its outside “normal” expectations. Here’ some basic information  from Wiki.

The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as “black swans” — undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.

The term Black Swan comes from the assumption that ‘All swans are white‘. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 17th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. Taleb notes that John Stuart Mill first used the Black Swan narrative to discuss falsification.

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