What is a black swan? Imagine you put ten people in a room. Most social, man-made aspects of human society-the economy, the stock market, politics-hail from Extremistan: They have no known upper or lower bounds, their behavior can’t be graphed on a bell curve, and individual events or phenomena-i.e., Black Swans-can have exponential impacts on averages. In Extremistan, however, randomness is wild, and deviations from the average can be, well, extreme. In black swan theory, blacks swans don’t live in Mediocristan. Physical characteristics such as height and weight are from Mediocristan: They have upper and lower bounds, their distribution is a bell curve, and even the tallest or lightest human being isn’t much taller or lighter than the average.
In Mediocristan, randomness is highly constrained, and deviations from the average are minor. To explain how and why Black Swans occur and what “black swan” means, Taleb coins two categories to describe the measurable facets of existence: Extremistan and Mediocristan. Once Taleb introduces the concept of the Black Swan, he delves into human society and psychology, analyzing why modern civilization invites wild randomness and why humans can neither accept nor control that randomness.īlack Swan Theory: Extremistan vs. What is a black swan? The fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1987 stock market crash, the creation of the Internet, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis-all are Black Swans.
Taleb’s black swan theory, however, is that Black Swans, by their very nature, are always unpredictable-they are the “unknown unknowns” for which even our most comprehensive models can’t account.
0 kommentar(er)
