As Taleb uses the term, the Black Swan symbolizes the uselessness of predictions based on previous experience. Black Swans are events or pieces of knowledge that sit outside our regular expectations and therefore cannot be predicted.

what’s going on. There are: a) epistemic arrogance and our corresponding future blindness; b) the Platonic notion of categories, or how people are fooled by reductions, particularly if they have an academic degree in an expert-free discipline; and, finally c) flawed tools of inference, particularly the Black Swan–free tools from Mediocristan.

knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously. Let us call an antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or

Now, there are other themes arising from our blindness to the Black Swan: a. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation. b. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy. c. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: