Concept · Investment & Valuation
Black Swan
Origin: Nassim Taleb (2007)
Biological Parallel
The Cretaceous asteroid wasn't predictable from dinosaur experience—65 million years of evolutionary history contained no precedent for a 10km impactor. Non-avian dinosaurs had optimized for Cretaceous conditions, making them exquisitely vulnerable to the unprecedented. Taleb's Black Swan describes these outliers beyond the domain of normal expectation: events so rare that no amount of past observation predicts them, yet retrospectively they seem obvious, reshaping entire systems in moments.