Shownotes Transcript
The First Black Swan
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The First Black Swan
“The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”
―Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Let’s say that there’s a new exotic creature that has appeared in the realm of zoology, called a “swan.” This is pretty interesting—no one has ever heard of swans before. The few people who have encountered swans say that all of them have been white.
You are a swan enthusiast and, charmed by the stories you’ve heard about these magnificent creatures, you decide to study them more carefully. You embark on a journey to take as many photos of swans as possible. After years of laborious efforts, you capture 1,000 pictures of swans, all of them white. Can you conclude that all swans on the planet are white? How certain are you? Can you express this certainty in a probability, p1, from 0 to 1?
How much would your certainty level change if you had taken 10,000 photographs, or a million photographs? Can you come up with a new probability, p2? Would p1 be smaller or larger than p2? If you’re like most people, you would—reasonably—assume that ten thousand or a million photographs give you more evidence and greater confidence than only 1,000 photographs. So, p2 > p1.
Let’s say that all swanologists in the world for ten years have recorded only pictures of white swans. So, the consensus is that swans are white.
But then someone shows up with a picture of a black swan. [3] What now? Now the probability of the statement “all swans are white” is 0. Pure zero. Absolute certainty about the negation of a fact.