Coronavirus: the difficulty of acting in the face of "black swans"

"Events have stopped going on strike, " wrote Jean Baudrillard a few days after September 11: planes crashing into the twin towers came to put an end to a decade of seemingly "end of history." Unpredictable, unexpected, with unprecedented consequences, September 11 had everything that Nassim Taleb called a "black swan". In The Black Swan. The power of the unpredictable, best-seller published in 2007 (translated into 32 languages ​​and published in France by Éditions des Belles Lettres), the probabilist and former trader examines these exceptional events that change the course of the world and cognitive biases (these automatisms of our brain structurally distorting our thinking) that prevent us from preparing for it.

Why "black swan"? Before the discovery of Australia, the Old World was convinced that all swans without exception were white: the discovery of dark volatiles on this new soil invalidated this assumption drawn from a naive empiricism.

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