Scientific Definition
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Plain-English Definition
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Feynman Explanation
Every Black Swan looks obvious in the post-mortem.
Core Principle
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Strategy that survives the events you can't predict.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Every Black Swan looks obvious in the post-mortem.
Examples
- 2008. COVID. ChatGPT.
- Strategy that survives the events you can't predict.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Invest in resilience and optionality, not in better forecasts.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Invest in resilience and optionality, not in better forecasts.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Ignoring general statistics in favor of specific, vivid information.
Posterior = (likelihood × prior) / evidence.
Update beliefs in proportion to the strength of new evidence.
Start with a prior; update with new evidence.
Novices experiencing early success, often due to variance and small samples.
Striking pattern that is statistically expected in large samples.
Reasoning in distributions — ranges and probabilities — rather than points.
Average outcomes across the population differ from outcomes across time for one person.
A rough calculation using order-of-magnitude reasoning.
In quantum mechanics, certain pairs of properties cannot both be precisely known.
We ignore sample size when judging probability.
Bet size optimized to maximize long-run growth without ruin.