The Black Swan
Theory : The Impact of the Highly Improbably;
it is a metaphoric theory developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb that
refers to almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and
artistic accomplishments that don’t have a direction and are unexpected as "black
swans".
Several examples and concepts "Is it luck?: Fooled by randomness" the start point of the problem of induction exemplified graphically in the case of "Russell duck " which founds that every morning the humans fed him , after several months of observations the duck concludes as a universal law ("these humans are so nice, they must love me a lot, every day I get to eat"), when the arrival of Thanksgiving Day came the unexpected death for the duck. Well, our thinking is not very different from the "Russell duck." Much of the mathematical statistics, calculated risks and probability distributions are crossed by this way of thinking: a higher frequency of occurrence of an event less sensitivity to the unexpected.
A casualty satisfies these three properties: high impact, impossible to calculate and surprise. First, the incidence produces a disproportionately large effect. Second, it has a small chance but impossible to calculate based on available information before the fact of being perceived. Third, the most damaging property of the "black swan" is its surprise effect: at any given time of observation there is no convincing evidence indicating that the event will occur.
A black swan effect is the retrospective distortion, something that economists and historians to explain the causes of an economic crisis or a world war, but are unable to anticipate it:. There is a philosophical and genetic basis for understanding that fact. The evolution did not favor us with a type of complex and probabilistic thinking, on the contrary we are very quick to take instant decisions supported by a minimal amount of data or theories superficial and lacking in strength, perhaps because those who saw a lion and ran away by assume that all wild animals always eat humans were more likely to survive than those who preferred to test this hypothesis experimentally. Of course there are friendly lions (as there are black swans), but it is better to be prudent and cautious instead of suffer the consequences later (problem of induction). There is also a fundamental philosophical problem: the Platonicity or "Platonic fallacy." We are children of the Platonic school that encouraged us to prefer the structured theory, ordinary and understandable to the messy and complex reality on the other hand, also inclines us to select only those facts that fit our theories (fallacy of silent evidence) or when the events have taken place
Another phenomenon is the circularity of statistics and the collateral damage caused by the normal or Gaussian distribution: we need data to find the probability distribution. How do we know if we have enough for the probability distribution?. How do you know which is Gaussian?. By the data. So we need data to tell us what the probability distribution we must assume, and that a probability distribution to tell us how much data we need. This circularity causes serious problems in the regression, more pressing when applied without discrimination of Gaussian distributions to everything that moves. Imagine that we have in a football stadium 1,000 people randomly assembled inside. If we add to them the tallest person in the world will it change much the average height of 1,001 people gathered?. No, not hardly vary. Welcome to Mediocristan, whose mathematics is the algebra of classical statistics and probability theory. In that world, the distributions are normal, with curves in the form of the famous bell curve. Individual variations do not vary much average. Now let's take those same 1,000 people and we come into the stadium Bill Gates, reportedly one of the richest men in the world. Will it change much the average wealth of the gathering? Yes, change from one form to enter brutal Bill with more than 50,000 million dollars of assets. Welcome to Extremistan, which are much less orthodox mathematics, for example, fractal geometry, those distributions follow a power law as the Zipf or Pareto or, more recently, the "Long Tail”, black swans are Extremistan.
The neurologists know that our brains are programmed to be in control of everything that happens. However, the fact is that our brain is literally in the dark, hidden under the cranial cavity, and the only contact I have outside is through imperfect bodies, either the sight, touch, sense of smell or taste. And since our brain is programmed to control everything and due to imperfection of the perceptions that come to him, elaborates what he can, creating abstract models of reality, which sometimes do not have to coincide with reality itself. In few words, the explanation could be that we are not physiologically prepared for unforeseen events. There are unpredictable events yet.
