Rare, high-impact events dominate outcomes and are rationalised as predictable only afterwards.
Taleb's test is the turkey's: 1,000 days of reliable feeding are the strongest possible evidence right up to the afternoon before Thanksgiving. The 2008 crisis models assigned near-zero probability to what happened.
In practice
- A firm's risk register lists twenty scenarios and its failure comes from the twenty-first, which is afterwards described as obvious.
- A career is derailed by an event nobody's plan contained, and the retelling makes it look like a trajectory.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Risk & Reliability
- Essay
- How accidents actually happen