Black Swan


A Black Swan event has three attributes.

  1. It’s an outlier (we don’t expect it)
  2. It carries an extreme impact
  3. We make up explanations after-the-fact to make it explainable and predictable (Hindsight Bias & The Narrative Fallacy)

People used to believe that all swans were white.

What one must realize is that it only takes one non-white swan to disprove this: and disproved it was, when Australia was discovered.

Incoming links: Mental Models
Outgoing links: The Narrative Fallacy