For millennia, it was universally accepted that all swans were white. But in 1697, Willem de Vlamingh, a Dutch explorer, discovered black swans while on a rescue mission in Australia and in an instant, a universal, incontrovertible truth was shown to be anything but. After Vlamingh’s discovery, philosophers used the term “black swan” to describe a seeming logical impossibility that could very well end up being possible. This is the black swan fallacy..

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Do we really know what forces are effecting the course of our lives?
Or are our perceptions so limited by what we think we observe,
our whole concept of reality can shatter in an instant?
Can we learn to "expect the unexpected" only in hindsight,
or can we awaken and learn to do so with foresight?

A Black Swan, (a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book "The Black Swan"), is an event or occurrence that deviates beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

One aspect of the black swan theory suggests that upon observing 100 swans the norm is to fixate on the one black swan (the black swan event) to the exclusion of the ninety-nine other white swans.  

Taleb suggests that "9/11" might therefore be viewed as a "black swan event" in that its effect was to cause a fixation on the 1% of the time that there is a security threat to the exclusion of the other 99% of the time when there is no threat.  

Conversely, Taleb also suggests that had an individual, on the day before "9/11", instituted a security policy that prevented the attack, the actions of that individual (a white swan) would have gone unnoticed as there would have been no "black swan event" to bring the matter to attention. Therefore, "the hero who prevented 9/11 and changed the course of history" would never have been recognized as having done so. 

So, can we know what goes on in our own little pond while only paying attention to the extraordinary black swan and the ripples it leaves in its wake? 

Or, can we awaken to recognize the effects the unremarkable white swans’ ripples have on our little pond as well?

"Things always become obvious after the fact” 

~  Nassim Nicholas Taleb ~

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a flaneur and researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability.

Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto (The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and Skin in the Game) an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision making when we don’t understand the world, expressed in the form of a personal essay with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientic discussions in nonover lapping volumes that can be accessed in any order.

In addition to his trader life, Taleb has written more than 50 scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability.