black swan theory
“a black swan is a large-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. taleb nassim 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, cygnus atratus in australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass.
