[KosmicKitty]

The Black Swan is a catastrophic event that we cannot anticipate because it goes against everything we have ever known to be true. But once it occurs, there is the tendency to believe that we should have seen of coming. Basically, a black swan is the unknown unknown that we cannot prepare for because we never see it coming.

Taleb says the 9/11 was such an event but many of my colleagues disagree because some of them did see 9/11 coming.

Spent many hours in my Risk Analysis class talking about black swans.

[Sherman Logan]

Taleb says the 9/11 was such an event but many of my colleagues disagree because some of them did see 9/11 coming.

The problem here is that I've yet to see a dated publication prior to 9/11 warning of the danger of airliners being flown into skyscrapers. Somebody may indeed have foreseen this, but I suspect its mostly hindsight genius.

The closest I've seen to prediction of this disaster was in a Tom Clancy novel, when a Japanese radical flies a plane into the Capitol during the State of the Union address. But that was a cargo plane.

[aruanan]

Taleb says the 9/11 was such an event but many of my colleagues disagree because some of them did see 9/11 coming.

Taleb would have to be even more blind than the blind sheik not to have seen 9/11 coming after the first attempt on the WTC.