While most of us might be sufficiently familiar with black swans from a zoological point of view, not many of us are equally aware of the deep philosophical impact that the discovery of such bird brought with it.
Even those who have meditated on the meaning of a Black Swan aren’t invulnerable from its impact. Try and test yourself: how difficult would you find it to compare a black swan (animal) to a pink elephant? Could you consider equally possible the discovery of the latter as it had been for the former? The only difference here lies in the fact that while we (now) know that black swans do exist, we have no record (yet) of existing pink elephants. It’s a matter of proved existence vs potential existence. Unfortunately, we must acknowledge that a significant percentage of the technological discoveries or historical events of the last two millennia have taken place when everybody least excepted them.
This leads us to a very important concept:

“what you don't know is far more relevant than what you do know."

Keeping that in mind, it would be wise to reconsider our habitual way of thinking about the past, especially when it comes to assess its influence over what is (or is not) about to happen in the near/far future. This may be even more crucial in modern society, where highly unpredictable events have become, paradoxically, something quite common).

WHAT MAKES AN EVENT A BLACK SWAN?

According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, there are three main characteristics that define an event as a Black Swan:

• It must be an outlier
• It has a big impact
• It carries an intransitive predictability, meaning that it considered predictable only after its occurrence.

With Taleb’s words:

“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.
First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

I KNEW IT!

If we meditate further about the last characteristic provided by Taleb, we would agree that such an event mainly teaches one important lesson: we could have predicted it, at least to some extent, would have we be aware of more information (or different kind of information). Just like an equation giving you a very unexpected result because you missed something, a Black Swan will likely show you the consequences of your mistaken view.
For a better understanding, Taleb provides the example of life from the point of view of a turkey:

“Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.”

Importance of being qualitatively lazy: how to maximize your collection of information
Should the turkey have known about the content of the Thanksgiving menu, it might have tried to escape from the ones who kept feeding it day after day.

Here comes the fundamental lesson brought by Black Swans, aka how avoid end up like a turkey. Are we aware about the extent of our ignorance? How much do we know about the information that we didn’t collect? Are we willing to dig further and analyze every aspect of empirical reality before trying to assess potential outcomings?

In conclusion, research is an activity of crucial importance for every person operating in the cryptoworld, which proved to be much more complicated and random than what most of us expected. What is more important is keeping in mind that in order to evaluate the occurrence of events we might not only go through the specifics of events but also their general dynamics as well as not only collecting large quantity of data but meaningful one.

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Enjoy the ride,
Black Swan Team