Many Black Swans Make the Metaphor Meaningless: Alice Schroeder
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Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Nassim Taleb believes inprobabilities, not predictions, but at times it can be hard totell the difference. “The real Black Swan event,” he said inJune, “is that people are not rioting against the banks inLondon and New York.”
Taleb saw it coming, and his well-publicized remark may bethe only reason Occupy Wall Street hasn’t been labeled a blackswan. This once-rare bird, made ubiquitous by Taleb’s best-selling 2007 book of the same title, now appears so often afterdramatic events, such as Occupy Wall Street, that sightings ofit have become meaningless.