Black swans are unforeseeable events that have an inordinate impact on the course of history, such as a stock market crash or 9/11. Well, actually, Mr. Taleb, I am not so sure about that one. We seem to have forgotten it already. As another example, Taleb invents a fictitious author, Yevegenia Krasnova, a former neuroscientist whose eccentric book A Story of Recursion is an unlikely success story after she begins to publish it on her blog. Chris Anderson would say this is the long tail of the distribution, the way the internet allows people everywhere to find whatever fits their narrow interests. I think we can distinguish two things here. The Snakes on a Plane effect, which is a function of the speed of information transfer, and the butterfly batting its wings to cause a hurricane 3 years later, on the other side of the Pacific. We just don't know to which category Apple Planting in America belongs. Most likely, of course, it belongs to the wing batting of the other butterfly, the one that didn't cause a storm.
I had a friend who grew up near Sacramento. He said it used to be full of apple orchards and blackberry brambles. He used to play fort in the bushes with his brothers, and ride around on homemade bikes. Often they had nothing else to eat except the berries, and my friend never quite got over feeling like one of the orphan children from the boarded up clap house. I think Apple Planting in America could have been his sister, and now she is either a professor of comparative literature at Stanford, or living in a homeless shelter in Hayward. They say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
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