Taleb's Thesis and Me

Well here I go addressing the crux of this blog space, as I envisioned it, by focusing my attention and reflections on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan".

He begins in the Prologue "... a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility."

Who would have "thunk" such an event? Unbelievable? Holy shit! I can't believe what I am seeing or hearing!

I've said all of the above if not aloud at least sub vocally to myself.  Perhaps these thoughts arise in me more from ignorance or naiveté than true Black Swans.  Yet I do recognize the significance of this first attribute of a Black Swan. It seems to come upon us from out of nowhere.  We didn't see it coming.

"Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird)."

I am standing on the 6th tee at Spring Valley Lake CC in a partner's better ball event when I start to feel strange happenings in and around my mouth and chin.  By the 18th hole I cannot move my neck much at all and cannot speak with mouth movements almost like I was trying to be a ventriloquist.  I finish the round of golf, immediately find a phone, call my wife Carol and ask her to come pick me up. She recognizes there is something terribly wrong in my call and rushes to pick me up and takes me directly to the ER where to make this long story short, I was having a seizure.  I was later diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and treated for same.  The cause was thought to be my allergy to phenylkeltonurics as in Nutrasweet. So this was a personal Black Swan.  I've since had a couple of "heart attacks" and open heart surgery BUT they were not Black Swans since my family history and having been a smoker would have negated the first two attributions for a Black Swan. But this epileptic event was a Black Swan.

"Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for it occurrence after  the fact, making it explainable and predictable."

Hindsight. "I knew it all along" phenomenon. Postmortem!

"I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.*

*The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan. Note that, by symmetry, the occurrence of a highly improbable event is the equivalent of the nonoccurrence of a highly probable one."

So, reflect on Black Swans in your life.