No. 53 · Risk · Statistics and Probability
Black Swan Event
What matters most is often what nobody saw coming.
In the Almanac
“Vlamingh’s black swans”, 1697 · “Insuring the unthinkable”, 2001–2002
Both stories in full, three ways to use it and where it misleads.
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Questions
What is Black Swan Event?
A Black Swan, popularised by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a rare and unforeseeable event with enormous consequences, named after the black swans Europeans once thought impossible. Events like 9/11 show the limits of predicting the future from past data.
How do you use Black Swan Event?
Since you can't predict Black Swans, build for them instead. Stay humble about forecasts, diversify your skills and investments, keep backup plans and redundancy for critical systems, and aim for antifragility: positioning yourself to withstand shocks and even benefit from them.
When does Black Swan Event matter?
Black Swan Event is one of the 32 mental models for risk, the situations where you ask: What could go wrong, and what will I do if it does? Within that, it belongs to “The unexpected”, alongside Boiling Frog, Butterfly Effect and Chaos Theory.
What is an example of Black Swan Event?
Two stories show it at work: Vlamingh’s black swans (1697) and Insuring the unthinkable (2001–2002). Both are told in full in The Mental Models Daily Almanac, which has two stories for each of its 365 models.
Which mental models are related to Black Swan Event?
Fat-Tailed Distributions, Unknown Unknowns and Resilience. Black Swan Event itself comes from statistics and probability.