BLACK SWAN FLIES OVER JAPAN

——————————–

A black swan isn’t just a ballet role played to perfection by Natalie Portman that won her an Oscar for best actress.

As developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his masterful scholarly work The Black Swan, praised by many as one of the most important books of the century, the black swan is a metaphor about the significance of unexpected events in history.

As he explains it, it is an event with three attributes:

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

Second, it carries an extreme impact.

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

Simply put, black swans are things we were certain could never happen. The unexpected overwhelms us because our egotism doesn’t allow for considering the possibility of human error. The ancient Greeks understood overweening pride as the underlying cause of man’s downfall.
——————————–

From an article by Rabbi Benjamin Blech for Aish.com