Ornithologist View: The black swan (Cygnus atratus) is a large waterbird, a species of swan which breeds mainly in the southeast and southwest regions of Australia. Within Australia they are nomadic, with erratic migration patterns dependent upon climatic conditions. Black swans are large birds with mostly black plumage and red bills. They are monogamous breeders, with both partners sharing incubation and cygnet rearing duties.

Black swans were introduced to various countries as an ornamental bird in the 1800s, but have escaped and formed stable populations. Black swans are mostly black-feathered birds, with white flight feathers. The bill is bright red, with a pale bar and tip; and legs and feet are greyish-black. Cobs (males) are slightly larger than pens (females), with a longer and straighter bill. Cygnets (immature birds) are a greyish-brown with pale-edged feathers.

Before the discovery of Australia, people were convinced all swans were white. The sighting of the first black swan, might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists. There is severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.

Economist View: One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sighting of millions of white swans.

Black swan is an event with 3 attributes:

1.  Rarity: outlier event lies outside the realm of regular expectation

2.  Extreme impact

3.  Retrospective predictability: human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence making it explainable and predictable

Our blindness with respect to randomness of particularly large deviations is important to observe.

It is easy to see that life is the cumulative effect of a handful of significant shocks. It is not hard to observe the Black Swan from your armchair.

Count the technological changes, inventions in your environment, since you were born and compare them to what was expected before they happened. How often did these occur according to plan?

Black Swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know. Sept 11th 2001 was a Black Swan event for the victims, not for the perpetrators.

Take an idea for a restaurant, a killer recipe is a killer recipe only because no one knows it. It would be generic if the neighbor knew of it. The pay off of a human venture is in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be. What you know, cannot really hurt you. Consider the Indian Ocean Tsunami 2004, had it been expected, it would not have caused the damage it did. We act as though we can predict the course of events or even worse, we can change the course of history. We produce 30-year projects while we can’t predict the next year.

Spriritual View: The hamsa (Sanskrit: हंस, haṃsa or hansa) is an aquatic bird of passage, which various scholars have interpreted as the goose, the swan, or even the flamingo. Its icon is used in Indian and Southeast Asian culture as a spiritual symbol and a decorative element. It is believed by Hindus to be the vahana (or vehicle) of Brahma, Gayatri, Saraswati, and Vishvakarma

Jean Vogel, in 1952, questioned the identification of hamsa as swan, because swans were rare, at least in modern India, while the bar-headed goose (Anser indicus) were somewhat common.

However, the earliest art in India, up until the early colonial period, does not depict swans, but rather birds that resemble the bar-headed goose. Hence, the birds painted at the Ajanta Caves in the depiction of the Hamsa Jataka resemble the bar-headed goose, which are famous for their yearly migration into the Himalayas, while the text of the Jataka itself clearly describes white swans that are like clouds in a blue sky.

The word Hamsa is also used for a mythical or poetical bird with knowledge. In the Rig Veda, it is the bird which is able to separate Soma from water, when mixed; in later Indian literature, the bird separates milk from water when mixed. In Indian philosophical literature, hamsa represents the individual soul or spirit (typified by the pure sunlight-white like color of a goose or swan), or the "Universal Soul or Supreme Spirit”. 

This is Damayanti and the Swan - in the eternal love story of Nala & Damayanti.

Economist View: The Idea of Robustness – why do we formulate theories leading to projections and forecasts without focusing on the robustness of the theories and the consequences of the errors? It is much easier to deal with Black Swan Events if we focus on robustness to errors rather than improving prediction.

There is so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. You can set yourself up for serendipitous Black Swans of the positive kind by maximizing your exposure to them.

In a scientific discovery or a venture capital investment you have typically little to lose and massive gain from a rare event. According to social science wisdom almost no discovery no technologies of note, came from design and planning-they were just Black swans. The strategy is then to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan Opportunities as you can.

Another human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know we tend to learn the precise and not the general.

From 9/11 did we learn defect of conventional wisdom?

Did we learn some events are outside the realm of predictability?

Or we learnt precisely to avoid tall buildings and Islamic prototerrorists?

We are conditioned to be specific. The structure of mind is such that it doesn’t learn rules, just facts and only facts. We scorn at the abstract.

Let us ask some deeper questions.

What are our minds made for?

It seems like we have a wrong user manual. Our minds so not seem to be made for thinking and introspection. Non thinking faster reacting cousin will run for cover when he meets a lion. Consider that thinking is time consuming and generally a great waste of energy. Our predecessors spent enormous time as non-thinking mammals.

Spiritual View: Paramahamsa Upanishad calls that Yogi a Paramahamsa who is neither opinionated nor affected by defamation, nor jealous, not a show off, is humble, and is oblivious to all the human frailties. Paramahamsa means "HIGHEST SWAN". He is immune to the existence of his body, which he treats as a corpse.

The Upanishad is a discourse between the Hindu god Brahma and sage Narada. Their conversation is centered on the characteristics of Paramahamsa (highest soul) Yogi. The text describes the monk as a Jivanmukta, a liberated soul while alive, and Videhamukta is liberation in afterlife. He is beyond false pretensions and lives realizing the Brahman.

He does not fear pain, nor longs for pleasure.

He forsakes love. He is not attached to the pleasant, nor to the unpleasant.

He does not hate. He does not rejoice.

Firmly fixed in knowledge, his Self is content, well-established within.

He is called the true Yogin. He is a knower.

His consciousness is permeated with that, the perfect bliss.

That Brahman I am, he knows it. He has that goal achieved.

— Paramahamsa Upanishad, Chapter 4 (Abridged)

Economist View: Nicolas Taleb in the Black Swan says Recursive means – the world in which we live has an increasing number of feedback loops causing events to be cause of more events. Thus, generating snowball, arbitrary, unpredictable planet wide winner takes it all effects. We live in an environment where information flows rapidly accelerating such epidemics.

A new kind of ingratitude. It is quite saddening to think of those people who have been mistreated by history. There were poetes maudits, like Edgar Allan Poe who were scorned by society and later worshipped and force fed to school children. We remember martyrs who dies for a cause that we knew about but those whose cause we were never aware of. The sad category of those who we do not know were war heroes who saved our lives, who helped us avoid disasters. They left no traces and did not even know that they even made a contribution. Everyone knows we need more prevention than treatment but few reward acts of prevention. We humans are not just a superficial race, we are a very unfair one. We glorify those who left their names in the history books at the expense of those contributors about who our books are silent.

Ornithologist & Spiritual View: The Indian ornithologist Salim Ali noted that Raghuvira's identifications of birds in Sanskrit literature were dubious and often far-fetched. Ali considered Raj-hamsa as the bar-headed and Kadamb as the greylag goose.

The hamsa was also used extensively in the art of Gandhara, in conjunction with images of the Shakyamuni Buddha. It is also deemed sacred in the Buddhadharma

Economist View: Life is very unusual. I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of the daily life. Bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Nicknamed Great Intellectual Fraud.GIF.

Too dull to write about. An essay is an impulsive meditation, not science reporting. Justify the use of Black Swan metaphor to describe the uncertain, unknown, imprecise – white ravens, pink elephants. I prefer to use stories to illustrate our gullibility about stories. You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent than ideas. The metaphor of a black swan is akin ‘rare bird’. Latin poet Juvenal refers to ‘a bird as rare as the black swan’.

The Bottom line – drive the focus to what makes sense to us.Living on our planet today requires a lot more imagination than what we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.

Let us call this collection of unread books as antilibrary.

Let us call this antischolar – someone who focuses on the unread books and makes an attempt to not to treat knowledge as a treasure or even a possession or even a self esteem enhancement device- a skeptical empiricist.

Ornithologist View: A mature black swan measures between 110 and 142 centimeters (43 and 56 in) in length and weighs 3.7–9 kilograms (8.2–19.8 lb.). Its wing span is between 1.6 and 2 meters (5.2 and 6.6 ft).The neck is long (relatively the longest neck among the swans) and curved in an "S"-shape.

The black swan utters a musical and far reaching bugle-like sound, called either on the water or in flight, as well as a range of softer crooning notes. It can also whistle, especially when disturbed while breeding and nesting.

 When swimming, black swans hold their necks arched or erect and often carry their feathers or wings raised in an aggressive display. In flight, a wedge of black swans will form as a line or a V, with the individual birds flying strongly with undulating long necks, making whistling sounds with their wings and baying, bugling or trumpeting calls

The black swan is almost exclusively herbivorous, and while there is some regional and seasonal variation, the diet is generally dominated by aquatic and marshland plants.

Like other swans, the black swan is largely monogamous, pairing for life (about 6% divorce rate). Recent studies have shown that around a third of all broods exhibit extra-pair paternity. An estimated one-quarter of all pairings are homosexual, mostly between males. They steal nests, or form temporary threesomes with females to obtain eggs, driving away the female after she lays the eggs The black swan's preferred habitat extends across fresh, brackish and salt water lakes, swamps and rivers with underwater and emergent vegetation for food and nesting materials. Permanent wetlands are preferred, including ornamental lakes, but black swans can also be found in flooded pastures and tidal mudflats, and occasionally on the open sea near islands or the shore.

Black swans were once thought to be sedentary, but the species is now known to be highly nomadic. There is no set migratory pattern, but rather opportunistic responses to either rainfall or drought.

Mindmap © Hans Buskes, thanks to Pascal Venier for fine-tuning definition Black Swan and Bart van Gerven for Black Swan example (ozon hole).