The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
The real thing that physics tell us about the universe is that it's big, rare event happens all the time — including life — and that doesn't mean it's special.
Adamson feels that drug developers are unreasonably concerned about rare events. The reality is children tolerate phase I therapy new agents being tested to find the best dosage and possible side-effects as well as or better than adults,. . . Once the initial studies are done that is, phase I trials in adults study should begin in children.
The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape our history.
In the immediate postwar era, financial crises in advanced countries were rare events, and before 1970 did not happen at all. Since then they have occurred more often, and 2008 was the most damaging of them all to date. If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises - like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s - then our economic future will be very different from our recent past.
The prospect of penury in age is so gloomy and terrifying that every man who looks before him must resolve to avoid it; and it must be avoided generally by the science of sparing. For, though in every age there are some who, by bold adventures, or by favorable accidents, rise suddenly to riches, yet it is dangerous to indulge hopes of such rare events; and the bulk of mankind must owe their affluence to small and gradual profits, below which their expense must be resolutely reduced.
So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
