“So far, the losses reported on Wall Street are staggering. But rumors of much larger losses are being whispered…and at least one source has suggested that the firms may be bankrupt…crushed by total system-wide losses of more than $3 trillion.”
In Nassim Taleb’s definition, a “black swan” is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb regards many scientific discoveries as black swans—”undirected” and unpredicted. He gives the September 11, 2001 attacks as an example of a Black Swan event.
The term black swan comes from the ancient Western conception that all swans were 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’s Black Swan has a central and unique attribute: the high impact. His claim is that almost all consequential events in history come from the unexpected—while humans convince themselves that these events are explainable in hindsight.
Taleb believes that most people ignore “black swans” because we are more comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness the Platonic fallacy, and argues that it leads to three distortions:
1. Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have a cause.
2. Ludic fallacy: believing that the structured randomness found in games resembles the unstructured randomness found in life. Taleb faults random walk models and other inspirations of modern probability theory for this inadequacy.
3. Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the probability of future events is predictable by examining occurrences of past events.
He also believes that people are subject to the triplet of opacity, through which history is distilled even as current events are incomprehensible. The triplet of opacity consists of
1. an illusion of understanding of current events
2. a retrospective distortion of historical events
3. an overvalue of facts, combined with an overvalue of the intellectual elite