THE CONCEPTION OF “BLACK SWAN”: CONTRADICTIONS AND APPLICABILITY IN THE MODERN BUSINESS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to review the book “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by N.Taleb. A new surge of interest in the book was caused by its author’s visit to Ukraine and holding workshop “The Black Swan: to conquer and to win in a world of chaos.” In view of the active advertising campaign of information partners of the workshop, it is stated the author presents his own methodology to succeed in today's unpredictable environment. However, as the analysis of the work shows, an attempt to explain what a particular author has gained through his experience may not always be correct from a scientific point of view. It took 528 pages of the text for the author to deliver well-known opinion of the well-known scientists that the world of social sciences is full of power laws. Hence the obvious conclusion follows: to avoid errors in studying and use of randomness associated with rare events, one should apply tools based on use of power laws of probability distribution. At the same time, the author does not give proposals, or at least examples of practical application of this law. The way of presentation and argumentation are not always convincing enough, and often even logically contradictory ones. This is clearly manifested in the proposed by the author “his own” means of struggle with the Black Swan and the strategy of this struggle, which are repackaging of known ideas.
As a result, we opined that the work does not contain anything new, and the question of attributing it to the scientific theory is at least a debatable one. In our view, the suchlike works carry a certain danger. Readers, without basic theoretical and methodological training, can become that “black swan” for the development of science and economic education. The scientific community is required to explain these concepts, reveal contradictions in their presentation and analyze the feasibility of its application in practice of domestic business.