Prepare for a ‘Gray Swan’ Climate
Black swans are the unexpected outliers, the rare and unpredictable events that defy our usual expectations and profoundly impact our world. They are the surprises that no one sees coming, the game-changers that reshape the landscape of the possible.
his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines a black swan as an event of low probability, extreme impact, and only retrospective predictability.
David Brooks • This Will Make You Smarter
The black swan is Nassim Taleb’s best-known idea, and the subject of his book of the same name. As Taleb points out, this simple little error of reasoning trips up experts every day, especially in the realm of finance. No-one can predict the inherently unpredictable. All the prior data might produce a lovely trendline that can be extrapolated out f
... See moreRichard Meadows • Optionality: How to Survive and Thrive in a Volatile World
But Taleb makes a careful, if overlooked, distinction: if we understand what the broader distribution looks like, the outcomes—however extreme—are correctly labeled as gray swans, not black swans. He calls them “modelable extreme events.”