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VIDEOOn September 5, 2021 a black swan appeared in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and attracted a lot of attention as you can see. Does this very rare appearance of a black swan in the very center of China portend a Black Swan event? By strange coincidence, on the very same day the black swan appeared in Tiananmen Square, a fascinating documentary about Black Swan Events, "The Worst Kind of Surprise: Black Swan Theory," was uploaded to YouTube. You can see a few excerpts of it in this video but I highly recommend you watch the entire documentary in the link below.The...

< snip >In "The Black Swan"--a kind of cri de coeur--Mr. Taleb struggles to free us from our misguided allegiance to the bell-curve mindset and awaken us to the dominance of the power law. The attractiveness of the bell curve resides in its democratic distribution and its mathematical accessibility. Collect enough data and the pattern reveals itself, allowing both robust predictions of future data points (such as the height of the next five people to enter the room) and accurate estimations of the size and frequency of extreme values (anticipating the occasional giant or dwarf. The power-law distribution, by contrast,...