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A black swan (Cygnus atratus) in Australia. The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did ...
For example, one might argue that it is valid to use inductive inference in the future because this type of reasoning has yielded accurate results in the past. However, this argument relies on an inductive premise itself—that past observations of induction being valid will mean that future observations of induction will also be valid.
In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb gives the example of risk models according to which the Black Monday crash would correspond to a 36-σ event: the occurrence of such an event should instantly suggest that the model is flawed, i.e. that the process under consideration is not satisfactorily modeled by a normal distribution.
We cannot validly argue (or induce) from "here is a white swan" to "all swans are white"; doing so would require a logical fallacy such as, for example, affirming the consequent. [3] Popper's idea to solve this problem is that while it is impossible to verify that every swan is white, finding a single black swan shows that not every
A perfect storm led to Bayesian sinking, experts say. The combination of unlikely factors that could have contributed to the ship's fate constituted a "black swan event," Matthew Schanck, chairman ...
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.
List-length effect: A smaller percentage of items are remembered in a longer list, but as the length of the list increases, the absolute number of items remembered increases as well. [163] Memory inhibition: Being shown some items from a list makes it harder to retrieve the other items (e.g., Slamecka, 1968). Misinformation effect
Informally, a statement is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false. For example, "All swans are white" is falsifiable because "Here is a black swan" shows it to be false. The apparent contradiction seen in the case of a true but falsifiable statement disappears once we know the technical definition.