math

Black Swans and the conept of antifragile for Nicholas Nassim Taleb

It was March 12, 2020. The Dow Jones plummeted 2,352 points in a single day – the largest point drop in history at the time. Within weeks, entire industries ground to a halt, governments printed trillions of dollars, and the world fundamentally shifted in ways no forecasting model had predicted. That was a Black Swan event.

Sound familiar? It should. Because while COVID-19 dominated headlines, it’s just the latest in a long line of events that “nobody could have seen coming” – yet somehow always seem obvious in hindsight.

These aren’t just random bad luck. They’re what mathematician and former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swan events” – and understanding them might be the most important mental model you’re not using.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Your brain is evolutionarily wired to miss the very events that will have the biggest impact on your life, career, and financial future.

We’re pattern-seeking machines living in a world where the most consequential changes don’t follow patterns. We build models based on what we’ve seen, then get blindsided by what we haven’t. We mistake the absence of evidence for evidence of absence. And we consistently underestimate the role of extreme, unpredictable events in shaping everything from economic markets to geopolitics to technological breakthroughs.

But what if I told you there’s a way to not just survive these unpredictable events, but actually benefit from them?

In the 5-minute video below, we dive deep into Taleb’s groundbreaking framework for navigating uncertainty. You’ll discover why COVID-19 wasn’t actually a Black Swan (according to Taleb himself), learn about the “Turkey Problem” that explains our collective blindness to risk, and most importantly – walk away with practical strategies to build what Taleb calls “antifragile” systems that grow stronger from disorder.

Because while you can’t predict the next crisis, you can absolutely prepare for it. And in a world increasingly dominated by AI breakthroughs, geopolitical shifts, and technological disruption, that preparation isn’t just smart – it’s essential.

Ready to rewire how you think about uncertainty? Let’s dive in.

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We have so many mental frames related to numbers, that have been handed down culturally for, in some cases, hundreds and even thousands of years. These numerical superstitions come from myths, some from science, some cultural and historic — and many are universal. They remind us that despite our differences across nations and across time, we human beings still have a lot more in common with one another than we have differences.

  • 1 is the loneliest number… but can also be unity, and the origin of all things
  • 2 is duality ☯️
  • 3’s a crowd
  • 4 is a square; representative of justice | Buddhist Four Noble Truths ⬛
  • 5 is alive
  • 6 is the first perfect number
  • 7 notes in the musical scale 🎼
  • 8 is paradise; lucky in Buddhism 🍀
  • 9 lives 😺
  • 10 is the most perfect number 🔟
  • 11 players in soccer & football ⚽
  • 12 is cosmological: zodiac symbols, stations of the Moon, stations of the Sun | 12 inches in a foot 📏
  • 13 lunar months in the year 🌙
  • 20 bucks 💵
  • 30 pieces of silver 💰
  • 40 days and 40 nights 🚣‍♂️
  • 50 ways to leave your lover | 50 shades of grey
  • 100 year centennial 💯
  • 1000 — millenarianism

I’ll keep adding to the list of numerical superstitions over time…!

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Is it possible the Condorcet jury theorem provides not just a mathematical basis for democracy and the justice system, but a model predictor of one’s political persuasion as well?

If you’re an optimist, you have no trouble believing that p > 1/2. You give people the benefit of the doubt that they will try their best and most often, succeed in tipping over the average even if just by a hair. That’s all it takes for the theorem to prove true: that the larger the number of voters, the closer the group gets to making the “correct” decision 100% of the time.

On the other hand, if you’re a pessimist, you might quibble with that — saying that people are low-information voters who you don’t think very highly of, and don’t find very capable. You might say that people will mostly get it wrong, in which case p < 1/2 and the theory feedback loops all the way in the other direction, to where the optimal number of voters is 1: the autocrat.

A political sorting hat of sorts

Optimists will tend to believe in the power of people to self-govern and to act out of compassion a fair amount of the time, thus leaning to the left: to the Democrats, social democrats, socialists, and the alt-Left. Pessimists will tend to favor a smaller, tighter cadre of wealthy elite rulers — often, such as themselves. They might be found in the GOP, Tea Party, Freedom Caucus, Libertarian, paleoconservative, John Birch Society, Kochtopus, anarcho-capitalist, alt-Right, and other right-wing groups including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and other white militia groups around the country.

Granted the model is crude, but so was the original theorem — what is the “correct” choice in a political contest? Or does the Condorcet jury theorem imply that, like becoming Neo, whatever the majority chooses will by definition be The Right One for the job? 🤔

…if so, we definitively have the wrong President.

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