To understand The Black Swan let’s start with an imagination exercise. What would happen if one day, walking down the street, you came face to face with a pink elephant? The impact it would have on you would make you wonder if you are perceiving correctly and surely your previous conception of the world would change.
Well, this same sensation was experienced by English settlers in Australia in 1967 when they sighted a black swan for the first time. Until then they only knew about white swans, so the discovery caused them a lot of surprise. From this anecdote, the philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb named his philosophical theory, published in the book The Black Swan, which addresses a type of events that he calls in this same way. This entry tells you more about it, through the following topics:
About the book
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is a book written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2007. It analyzes «rare events, of extreme impact and retrospective predictability, which can only be analyzed a posteriori».
It should be noted that for 36 weeks, the book was on the New York Times. bestseller list. In addition, it is part of the five-volume series written by Taleb called Incerto, which includes Fooled by randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007-2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010-2016), Antifragile (2012) and Skin in the Game (2018). It is currently studied in universities, where it has become a reference text to encourage critical and innovative thinking.
About the author
In the book, the author talks about his biography: a childhood in Syria marked by the beginning of the Lebanese war, after many years of relative peace. Taleb later migrated to the United States and graduated from Wharton University, after which he began working on Wall Street, where he witnessed the crash of 1987. He is currently a professor and works on risk mitigation in financial markets.
Nassim Taleb became aware of the existence of these types of events, which he names “black swans” largely because of his life story. As a child who grew up in a territory that suddenly entered into war, he had to go into exile to pursue his intellectual ambitions. He saw how the exiled Lebanese were stuck in a nostalgia where they idealized their previous life, ate their traditional foods and listened to their typical music and, although they had been in exile for more years than they had lived in their places of origin, they insisted that exile was a temporary situation.
The author also says that in his childhood years, he read a journalist who wrote the news in real time, that is, a history book not written retrospectively but as events were happening. In it there were comments that suggested that the French thought that Hitler was a “transitory phenomenon”, which explained the lack of preparation of their army for the Nazi invasion.
Key messages
Below I set out some of the key messages from the book for you to consider. But don’t deprive yourself of knowing the theory in the words of its author by reading this note. We recommend you read this interesting work.
What is a black swan?
«Black swans are events of great rarity, extreme impact and retrospective predictability, that is, they cannot be predicted but only analyzed a posteriori».
The greatest phenomena (for better and for worse) have no precedents and therefore the study of the past does not allow us to avoid or replicate them. People must be attentive to the events that occur around us to be able to detect when there will be changes, that is, we must have our eyes wide open to be able to spot the black swans.
The two faces of The Black Swan: Mediocristan and Extremistan
According to Taleb, in reality there are two “kingdoms”, so to speak, that of Extremistan and that of Mediocristán,in the first realm extraordinary events occur, while in the second, things are predictable and repeat themselves regularly. In the next section I cover more details about each of these “kingdoms”.
Mediocristan
In this realm, knowledge by induction is valued, that is, it is thought that because something has happened regularly, it will be repeated like this to infinity. There is a firm belief in the “bell curve,” Gauss’s popular bell curve. There is a naive platonization of the world, that is, it is understood by what it should be and not by what it is.
Taleb takes up an example developed by other philosophers long before him about the dangers of relying too much on inductive thinking: A turkey is fed every day, this event has been going on since it was born, so he is surprised when the farmer doesn’t feed him on Thanksgiving. For the turkey, not being fed is a black swan; The only knowledge he had of the world was that they fed him every day. He never imagined that it would end up being the family’s dinner.
Extremistan
Extremistan, for its part, is a fertile field for phenomena. It is the world of wealth, of poles, of the “weird”. A drastic fall in the stock market (negative black swan) is an Extremistan event, not very predictable; but so is the resounding success of Harry Potter in the publishing industry, a best seller (positive black swan) that has generated a great impact on society.
5 lessons marketers can apply
- Many economic theories and books that were designed for other areas of knowledge can be very useful for the work of a marketer, such is the case of this work.
- The fact that some event is repeated on a regular basis does not mean that it will always be that way. Let’s think about the impact of disruptive technologies on traditional marketing. The rise of user-generated content platforms or social networks themselves have revolutionized marketing.
- Thinking innovatively can help us identify changes in the market. In this way we will be prepared with a better offer for the rise of disruptive technologies.
- To imagine the impossible is to be prepared for the most improbable. You have to keep your eyes open to spot black swans, pink elephants and all kinds of unexpected oddities.
- But since these events are so difficult to predict, we must be adaptable to the environment and its changes, incorporating the most recent technologies into our knowledge, such as artificial intelligence currently.
At Letras Laetas, when we work with a client we take all these factors into account. If you require any of our content marketing services, contact us! We would love to know more about you and contribute to the success of your projects.
