Our favorite skeptical empiricist Nassim Taleb is interviewed by financial journalist, Consuelo Mack, where he shared his insights about history and rare events. He provides a definition of his most popular phrase “The Black Swan” which he uses to describe rare, unpredictable events that have unexpectedly large and widespread consequences for society. He cites as examples: The World Wars, the rise of the internet, Google, and stock market crashes. All these events were unexpected and unpredictable but had tremendous consequences for society after they happened.
He continues to explain that some fields and areas are more prone to Black Swans than others, in this case: economics, finance, technology, and history. Taleb describes how people in general do not understand the impact of rare events on their lives.
A “Black Swan” more than an event is a gap in human knowledge. The event is not unexpected or unpredictable. It is just that we (human beings) never knew about them earlier. The Black Swan always existed. Humans didn’t know about till they came to Australia.
The areas that Taleb mentions are areas where ignorance or poor theory is the norm. Hence most events that occur end up being unpredictable or unexpected
^ Agree. The gap in knowledge you mentioned is what contributes to the event’s unpredictability. Taleb’s context is that black swans are unexpected when using present means of inferring future events from past data (e.g. regression), when history will never be an exhaustive guide of all probable events.
There’s a follow-up post that describes the black swan context and history in more detail:
http://thecriticalthinker.wordpress.com/2009/01/15/what-is-a-black-swan/
I agree a little with the two post above. People try to predict events with information that they have gathered but if they miss something it could throw off the prediction by a lot. So the people giving the prediction always think they are right cause they don’t know they’re missing info if they are.