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The Black Swan comes to Duke
Topic Started: Mar 15 2010, 10:20 AM (363 Views)
Quasimodo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

"The black swan" was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement that describes impossibility, deriving from the old world presumption that 'all swans must be white', because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers. In that context, a black swan was something that was impossible, or near impossible and could not exist. After the discovery of black swans in Western Australia in 1697, by a Dutch expedition led by explorer Willem de Vlamingh on the Swan River, the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility may later be found to exist.


http://johnsville.blogspot.com/2007/11/black-swan-visits-duke-university.html

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2007

The Black Swan visits Duke University

Nathan Nicholas Taleb's best selling book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is a provocative big picture look at how colliding and cascading social forces are capable of causing unpredictable outlier events, or Black Swans.

(snip)

The 2006 Duke University lacrosse case is a perfect example of a Black Swan. The scandal was a shocking jolt at a leading academic institution. It was frequently referred to as the "perfect storm," because of its explosive mix of race, class, sex, athletes, and the South.

(snip)

Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race "looking out for its best interests" as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief. . .

The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck. . .
The Duke lacrosse team was just like that turkey. The team, for years, had gone along thinking that their friendly faculty was looking out for their best interests and feeding them knowledge. The lacrosse players had no idea a false gang rape accusation would turn the faculty (and many of their own classmates) into a lynch mob that wanted to wring their collective necks. Or castrate and flunk them as the case might be.

The jolting display of hatred towards the players by the infamous Duke Group of 88, their supporters, and campus radicals, all tacitly approved by the Duke administration, signaled that something was seriously wrong with higher education. It was in inflection point. The academic bubble that was a liberal arts education was burst. The Black Swan had landed.

(snip)

Taleb also spends time wringing the intellectual necks of story telling journalists. . .

He shows how "we fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy.... (it is actually a fraud, but, to be more polite, I will call it a fallacy.)" He defines a narrative fallacy as: "our need to fit a story or pattern to a series of connected or disconnected facts. The statistical application is data mining."

(snip)
Edited by Quasimodo, Mar 15 2010, 10:21 AM.
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