The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb. 2007

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Ethical principles in machine learning and artificial intelligence: cases from the field and possible ways forward (2020, background): “Potential black swans (Taleb, 2007) in the code should also be considered.”
Financing innovation: creative destruction vs. destructive creation (2013, background): “This of course is a lesson that has been learned after the financial crisis, with the advent of large ‘black swan events’ (Taleb, 2010), but one that researchers in the Schumpeterian-evolutionary tradition have been pushing for a much longer time (for a review of why innovation should be understood ”
Are Women Really More Risk-Averse than Men? (2012, unknown): “This measure is newly proposed in the current essay, but is derived from measures already in use in labor and housing research.”
Addressing failures in exascale computing (2014, background): “Unfortunately, humans are not good at handling the impact of ‘black swans’ (Taleb, 2010).”
Best Practices in Research for Quantitative Equity Strategies (2016, background): “Taleb [2007] calls this “narrative fallacy”— looking backward and creating a story to fit events.”
Significance tests as sorcery: Science is empirical—significance tests are not (2012, background): “…unsurprising then that most published papers are likely never read, that one of the biggest predictors of whether an author will cite a paper is whether he has seen it cited by others, and that, because of such factors, papers that become well known do so largely owing to chance (Taleb, 2007).”
Anticipatory Governance (2010, background): “…explore the full range of possible futures (Bartholomew, 2007; O’Toole, 2008), attributing this in part to experts’ inability to speculate beyond their past experience (Bartholomew, 2007; Postma & Liebl, 2005) and policy analysts’ reluctance to explore the possibility of rare events (Taleb, 2007).”
Reexamining the Relationship Between Academic Achievement and Social Behavior (2011, background): “More important, it directs that we expand our worldview to new levels of “what [we] don’t know” (cf. Taleb, 2007, p. xix).”
Systemic Risks in Society and Economics (2010, unknown): “Finally, there is the problem of “unknown unknowns” [101], i.”
Hot Topics and Popular Papers in Evolutionary Psychology: Analyses of Title Words and Citation Counts in Evolution and Human Behavior, 1979 – 2008 (2009, methodology): “Thus, citation frequencies for evolutionary psychology’s premier journal appear to be showing nearly the same distribution that is found in other sciences (Barabasi, 2003; Taleb, 2007 ).”
Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy (2017, background): “…loops from one set of institutions impacting others in unexpected ways, any ‘normal’ policy intervention began to demand further second-order correcting interventions to steer the system, that then in turn created further feedback loops and increased the demand for more interventions (Taleb, 2010).”
Organizational errors: Directions for future research (2011, background): “Such choices are mostly made far away (and far “above”) such events as medication errors and usually become relatively fixed over time.”