Views Thursday, October 13, 2011 New Zealand’s Oil Disaster: Black Swans and Human Errors A couple of years ago, the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb invented a new metaphor which describes what he calls low probability, high impact events – the Black Swan. For centuries this creature was not thought to exist, but then the discovery of a single animal turned this assumption on its head. What Taleb is getting at is the way in which our ideas about the way the world works can be totally shifted by a single, shocking event. Read more
