Black Swan

Overview

Taleb (2007): a black swan is (1) outside all prior expectations, (2) extreme impact, (3) obvious in hindsight only. Many domains (markets, careers, tech) are Extremistan (power-law / fat-tail), yet most models assume Mediocristan (Gaussian / thin-tail) — underestimating tail risk by orders of magnitude. The Turkey Problem: 1000 days of feeding creates confidence; day 1001 is Thanksgiving.

Composes with antifragile, probabilistic-thinking, inversion, first-principles.

When to Use

Use when: a risk model assumes normality in a fat-tailed domain; "never happened in N years" dismisses tail risk; strategy assumes stable environment; you're constructing a retrospective narrative; stress-testing against extreme scenarios; someone says "fat tails / Taleb / narrative fallacy / turkey problem"; a thesis rests on a one-directional trend like "AI demand can only go up," AI-capex payoff, or concentrated mega-cap / AI-bubble exposure.

Not when: domain is genuinely Mediocristan; "black swan" is being used to excuse a foreseeable planning failure.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)

• Engine mode: user has a concrete case → run The Process directly.
• Coach mode: user is unfamiliar or has no concrete case → guide step by step.