The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Many of our most significant discoveries as a human race have been uncovered entirely by accident, or by serendipity. Columbus sought to find a new route to India and ended up discovering America; two scientists happened upon microwave radiation while theorizing that the static they heard was caused by bird excrement; and Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin while looking for something else entirely. There is nothing inherently wrong with this serendipity. However, acknowledging it instead of creating false narratives after the discoveries does not lead to a greater understanding of Black Swan moments that lead to scientific or technological breakthroughs.

Taleb references the work of Sir Karl Popper, who argued that "in order to predict historical events you need to predict technological innovation, itself fundamentally unpredictable" (171). Taleb is once again highlighting the limitations of human knowledge. Human beings simply do not have enough information to make valuable predictions, and yet we constantly turn to "experts" to help us understand the direction in which we are headed, and how today's events will shape our future for years to come. 

Taleb articulates his idea of a utopia: In this society, people openly admit the value of their own ignorance, placing it above the value of their knowledge. He calls this utopia an "epistemocracy.” He then explains a concept he calls "future blindness," which he defines as "the inability to think dynamically, to position oneself with respect to a future observer" (194). The practical effects of this "future blindness" lead us to self-deception about how a particular decision or outcome will affect us, or how long the potential adverse consequences will last.

Taleb again expresses concerns about studying history in a way that produces causal, linear narratives between events. This perpetuates the notion that precedents—seeing a thousand white swans—will dictate the future, when in fact the future is far more unpredictable than we generally believe—the sighting of a black swan. Taleb alludes to the inherent tension between confirmation bias and objective analysis while studying historical events. When we seek to corroborate our biases through narratives that we ourselves construct, we lose the ability to analyze events objectively and empirically, both past and present.