black-swans

Read [runtime](../../content/RUNTIME.md) and [advisory rules](../../content/policies/advisory.md) before applying this skill. Other Foreman layers and the catalog are in `../../content/`, relative to this SKILL.md. # Black Swan Theory On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in American history. Within weeks, the global financial system stood at the brink of collapse. Virtually no mainstream economist had predicted the crisis. The models were elegant, the data was abundant, and the conclusions were catastrophically wrong. Nassim Nicholas Taleb had a name for this kind of event -- a Black Swan -- and his 2007 book of the same title had warned, with uncomfortable precision, that the financial system was a powder keg. The concept has since become indispensable vocabulary for anyone who takes risk seriously. A Black Swan is an event that satisfies three criteria: it is an outlier beyond the realm of regular expectations, it carries extreme impact, and human nature compels us to fabricate explanations for it after the fact, making it seem predictable in retrospect. The theory does not concern itself with predicting these events -- that is the point. It concerns itself with acknowledging their inevitability and structuring decisions accordingly. --- ## The Framework Taleb's argument rests on a distinction between two domains of uncertainty, which he labels Mediocristan and Extremistan. ### Mediocristan vs. Extremistan | Domain | Characteristi...