Is Tweeting Trump turning into a Black Swan?
OPINION face of all expectations.
These days, a Black Swan (with capital letters) has come to mean something again, but very different. It means a rare, surprising, unexpected, out-of-theblue, unplanned, unimaginable event with big, often worldchanging, consequences.
The new term was invented by Nassim Taleb – a Lebanese/ American statistician, professor of engineering and risk management at top French, British and American universities, a hedge fund manager and derivative trader who made a fortune out of the 2008 world financial crash.
As examples of Black Swans, Taleb lists the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, Hitler’s election as German chancellor in 1932, the collapse of the Soviet empire, 9/11, the invention of anesthetics, the car and the personal computer.
None of these things were foreseen the day before they happened. They were sudden, unexpected, unimaginable, seemingly impossible events.
Similar events shape our personal lives. We didn’t plan to meet our spouses. We didn’t plan to make or lose our fortunes. They just happened.
As a statistician, Taleb thinks that movers and shakers of the world get things wrong because they are obsessed with average events and trends ‘‘around the mean’’.
But, he argues, the real world is not shaped by average events but by extraordinary events, outliers or Black Swans on the bell curve. Taleb calls normal statistical distribution as the ‘‘Great Intellectual Fraud’’.
If we are to believe him, Black Swans have triggered most of the world-changing events in history, high finance, economics, politics, religion, in science and technology.
He asserts that most worldchanging scientific discoveries came, not from pre-planned centralised research, but from outof-left field tinkering.
We can also think of messianic figures like Jesus, Mohammed, Napoleon and the Ayatollah as Black Swans. They came unexpectedly from nowhere and changed the world.
The US breeds Black Swans. Look at Joseph Smith who reshaped the lives of Mormons, and Ron Hubbard who rules the lives and fortunes of Scientologists. And it looks as if Donald Trump is heading for Black Swanism.
When he announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, Trump was seen to be a rare, surprising, unexpected, out-of-theblue, unimaginable candidate and was widely dismissed as a ridiculous joke. But, he made it. To qualify as a fully-fledged Black Swan, Trump’s words or actions must prompt worldchanging consequences.
Looks like his grandiose, narcissistic, compulsive, exaggerated, lying, and shouting contradictory slogans on Twitter might permanently change the style and tone of world political