Mathematician Nassim Taleb popularized the term “black swan effect” to refer to the kinds of big phenomena one never thought would happen and that have a potentially catastrophic outcome. The origins of the expression date back to the 2nd century CE, when Roman poet Juvenal referred to “a bird as rare upon the Earth as a black swan,” as the Romans had only encountered white swans. A complete biological theory was developed to explain the swans’ singular coloring – that is, until the 17th century, when Dutch mariners discovered black swans in Australia, thereby rendering the paradigm obsolete in the blink of a black eye.While Taleb may not have come up with the term “black swan,” he applied it to statistically unexpected events of such large magnitude that they profoundly affect history. A small number of black swans, Taleb says, can explain just about everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions to elements of our personal lives.Taleb’s black swans can be characterized by a triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective predictability.• Rarity: A black swan event is an outlier that exists beyond the realm of normal expectations. Nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.• Extreme impact: The Black Plague of the Middle Ages is frequently cited here. In the modern age, COVID-19 serves a similar role, since the pandemic arrived unexpectedly and transformed society.• Retrospective predictability: Human nature prompts us to come up with after-the-fact explanations for how a seemingly inexplicable black swan event could occur. If we can predict a black swan, the thinking goes, we might be able to better manage it if it happens again.
SOMETIMES, PARADOXICALLY, we yearn for a black swan event.
Our political discourse and our tragically flawed leadership (worldwide, not just in Israel) are in desperate need of change. We can’t continue with the current hate-fueled divisiveness. Lately, though, it seems pointless to even dream. And yet, the message of Rosh Hashanah and black swan theory is that this, too, can change without notice. Fresh starts are always possible.After all, if the United States can ping-pong between Donald Trump as president in 2016, Joe Biden four years later, and potentially back to Trump in 2024, the same could happen here. The current Israeli coalition could fall; sane and competent ministers could take over after new elections; Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar could release the hostages and decamp to Tunisia; the Iranian people could rise up and overthrow the ayatollahs.“This war will almost certainly [produce] a new generation of leaders inside of Israel,” notes British journalist Douglas Murray, author of the best-selling book The War on the West. “This past year has produced remarkable people who stepped up to the moment. My hope is that a new generation of Palestinian leaders will come along at some point, too.”The average Israeli has little sway over any of these black swan events. Instead, we take comfort from the concluding lines of Rosh Hashanah’s “Un’taneh Tokef” prayer:• Who will live in quietude and who will be tormented?• Who will enjoy tranquility and who will be distressed?• Who will be impoverished and who will be enriched?• Who will be degraded and who will be exalted?That’s my hope for the coming year – that we will live in quietude and tranquility, that we will no longer be degraded and impoverished by our leaders and enemies alike but will be enriched and exalted, and that a new reality will upend the region, washing away the destructive black swans in our midst.
The writer’s book Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World has been published as an audiobook. Available on Amazon and other online booksellers. brianblum.com