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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 ...
Informally, a basic statement is simply a statement that concerns only a finite number of specific instances in universal classes. In particular, an existential statement such as "there exists a black swan" is not a basic statement, because it is not specific about the instance. On the other hand, "this swan here is black" is a basic statement.
Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (1817 – March 31, 1876), dubbed "The Black Swan" (a play on Jenny Lind's sobriquet, "The Swedish Nightingale" and Catherine Hayes's "The Irish Swan"), [1] [2] was an American singer considered the best-known Black concert artist of her time.
The observation of these black swans contradicts the law "All swans are white", but even if there were no black swans, the law would still be falsifiable, because identifying a swan and observing the color black would remain possible. Informally, a statement is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false.
Nicholas stresses therefore the surprising side and unpredictability of the black swan as well as their certainty (or unavoidability). Another concept that comes close to the concept of wild cards and black swans is the tipping point of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which actually is a special form of a wild card that realizes itself by ...
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.
Black swan theory – Theory of response to surprise events; Chronostasis – Distortion in the perception of time; Cognitive distortion – Exaggerated or irrational thought pattern; Defence mechanism – Unconscious psychological mechanism; Dysrationalia – Inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence
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.