Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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   The most important events in history are rarely the predictable ones — they are the huge, rare surprises nobody saw coming.

   The Black Swan · 2007

   The events that change the course of history are usually the ones no one anticipated.

   For centuries, Europeans believed all swans were white, because that was all they had ever seen. Then someone found a black swan in Australia, and the whole rule collapsed instantly. Taleb calls these rare, huge events black swans — the ones past experience never prepares us to expect.

   “A Black Swan is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations. 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 in retrospect.”

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