Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Un

Taleb is a good talker but not as smart as he thinks he is. (About halfway through "Black Swan" he starts taking potshots at scientists about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.) Anyhow, a "Black swan event" is NOT an "event with small probability but massive impact", that's a common misconception. A BSE is an event that, before it occurs no one credits it ("There are no black swans." because no one (in Europe) had ever seen one until they went to Australia (IIRC)), and after it occurs everyone post-rationalizes it. There are lost of events "with small probability but massive impact": people win the lottery every day. It's the ones we ignore, both before and after, that count as Black Swan Events.