Black Swan

“Black swan” enters Kyle’s notes through The Death of Expertise, which cites Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s study of black-swan events — the unforeseeable moments that can change history — to indict the whole enterprise of prediction. Taleb decries the “epistemic arrogance” of forecasting: we behave as if we can predict (or even alter) historical events, producing 30-year projections of social-security deficits and oil prices when we cannot reliably predict next summer, with cumulative prediction errors for political and economic events that are “monstrous.” In the book the concept anchors the prediction chapter’s argument that confident expert forecasting routinely overreaches.

Context: “Black swan,” popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, denotes a rare, high-impact event that is rationalized as predictable only in hindsight — a critique of over-reliance on models that assume the future resembles the past.

Where this appears

• The Death of Expertise — cites Taleb on black-swan events and the “epistemic arrogance” of prediction.