No European saw a black swan until 1697, when the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh sighted one off the coast of New Holland (aka western Australia). Until then, “all swans are white” was a phrase used as a standard example of a well-known truth, with the sighting of a black swan chalked up to something exceedingly rare if not nonexistent.
Nassim Taleb, in his 2007 book, ” The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable ,” updated and elevated the metaphor of black swans into a theory of how the world actually works. For Taleb, a black swan event stands as a hard-to-predict event of disproportionate, sometimes massive importance—that surprises everyone, but is then rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
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