DesignerJoes
01-03-2008, 11:19 AM
The Black Swan cometh... today.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
"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."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?_r=1&ex=1178769600&en=bdae1078f2b4a98c&ei=5070&oref=slogin
"Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence...
It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird."
What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries an extreme impact.
Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_indexx.html
"Much of what happens in history", he notes, "comes from 'Black Swan dynamics', very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable 'outliers', while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
"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."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/chapters/0422-1st-tale.html?_r=1&ex=1178769600&en=bdae1078f2b4a98c&ei=5070&oref=slogin
"Before the discovery of Australia, people in the old world were convinced that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely confirmed by empirical evidence...
It illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All you need is one single (and, I am told, quite ugly) black bird."
What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.
Second, it carries an extreme impact.
Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb04/taleb_indexx.html
"Much of what happens in history", he notes, "comes from 'Black Swan dynamics', very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable 'outliers', while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; "