Shared by JohnH

Hope we can find an audio recording.

I thank those who came to Philadelphia for the lecture.

Though black swans aren’t as rare as once thought, their symbolism is that of transformative occurrences, like 9/11. Photo: CC BY: JoshBerglund19

 

 

Why call big surprises black swans?
It goes back to the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal, who said that some events are “as rare a bird as a black swan.” In reality, black swans aren’t so rare, but Europeans once believed there was no such thing because they had never seen one. Their certainty evaporated when early European explorers of Australia came upon swans whose feathers were black. The term has recently come into vogue thanks to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which became a surprise best seller after the 2008 financial crisis. As defined by Taleb, a black swan is not just an unprecedented event but one with a large, widespread impact. “A small number of black swans,” Taleb writes, “explain almost everything in our world.”

Although predictions of the death of AQR and its ilk, by the writer and investor Nassim Taleb, among others, turned out to have been greatly exaggerated, worries linger, even as some high-profile quants have surged back. Taleb and the other critics think their overreliance on computers gives quants excessive confidence and blinds them to the possibility of seemingly rare economic catastrophes–which seem to be not so rare these days. (This was the theme of Taleb’s best-selling book, The Black Swan, which examined the effect of the "highly 
improbable" on markets, and on life.) As Exhibit A, they point to the extraordinary events of May 6, 2010, when the Dow dropped by nearly 1,000 points in a few minutes after an algorithmic program executed by the investment firm Waddell & Reed, in Kansas, triggered a terrifying blitz of automated buying and selling by other financial computers. The market quickly recovered, but many worry that the episode was a preview of greater turbulence ahead as machines gain control of more and more trading.

Shared by JohnH

How about 300 pages of reader reviews, again at GoodReads.com

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb 

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

3.66
·
 

rating details
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4,153 ratings
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973
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A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everythin…moreA black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.