And now there’s this one: The world is divided into people who know what a “black swan event” is and those who are clueless. Judged by the number of people who have worked the phrase into their public pronouncements, the Society of the Black Swan is spreading faster than a wickedly clever (or cleverly wicked) tweet.

I just googled “black swan” and came up (in 0.27 seconds) with 10,100,000 hits. There may not have been a more popular catchphrase since “bird in the hand” (32,400,000 hits), “gift horse” (28,900,000 hits), “elephant in the room” (19,000,000 hits) and “bad penny” (13,200,000 hits).

Let me illustrate the drawing power of “black swan” by describing something that has never happened to me before and that, frankly, I never expect to happen again. I don’t know yet if it was a black swan event for me personally, but it certainly fulfilled the first of the three requirements for being one. That is, it was a surprise to the observers (that would include me, a poker-faced flight attendant on United Airlines Flight 569 from Tampa to Chicago and about two rows of passengers forward of the row containing seat 13C and about four rows of passengers to the rear).

The value of carrying a trendy book
As Flight 569 was about to pull away from the gate, I noticed that two seats in the row in front of me were unoccupied. It used to be that the airline seldom objected to someone slipping into an unused space. But in today’s cutthroat skies, no sooner had I plopped down in one of the vacant seats than a stern-faced flight attendant was at my elbow demanding an additional $39 for the extra legroom on that row.

I demurred and returned to my original seat. The plane took off, I settled in, closed my eyes and was close to falling asleep. Suddenly, the second (poker-faced) flight attendant shook my shoulder firmly. “This gentleman,” she said, pointing to the lone occupant of the row I had just attempted to crash, “has paid for your upgrade.”

He was a pleasant-looking, middle-aged fellow who looked like he probably knew his way around a tennis court. “What’s this all about?” I asked. He gestured at the copy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable that I’d brought along to read. “You just looked like an interesting guy,” he shrugged. He was head of the economics department at one of the Chicago area’s elite, small liberal arts colleagues. And a world-traveled expert on the financial impact of big sporting events and the financing of public sports arenas, among other things. We had a wonderful chat flying to Chicago. One of the things we talked about was black swan events.

1 out of 3 may get you a $39 upgrade
I’m going to assume that there probably isn’t a single person reading this blog item who has yet to hear the name “Nassim Nicholas Taleb” or who has not heard of his latest book. (If you haven’t, that’s okay, very Taleb-like, in fact, in that the “highly improbable” seems to be getting more and more—well—probable these days. Just go to Wikipedia and get up to speed.) The rest of my readers will likely understand when I observe that the reason I doubt that my getting an unexpected $39 upgrade from another passenger on Flight 569 will actually turn out to be a black swan event for me personally is that the other two criteria that Taleb requires for a genuine Black Swan are missing. Namely—

The event has a major impact.
After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

To which I will rejoin that one out of three isn’t a bad start. Certainly, my upgrade by a stranger who wanted to chat with me on a flight to Chicago was unexpected and thus met black-swan-event-criteria No. 1:

The event is a surprise (to the observer).

Taleb is—what?—an intellectual swashbuckler? He’s a former Wall Street hedge fund manager and now a professor who thinks nearly all Wall Street traders, bank risk managers and economists are, plainly, posers and idiots. But then he also places most users of statistical methods professionally, including academicians, physicians, philosophers and government financial regulators, in that category. This middle-aged Lebanese-born curmudgeon derisively calls them “quants” (as in quantitative users of mathematics to try to predict how the world, and especially, the world of finance, works) and he’s at war with them because they keep trying to predict things that, or so Taleb says, turn out to be black swan events and thus are not predictable.

Sometimes, Black Swans are positive, but the ones we remember most may not be. In his book, first published in 2007, Taleb lumps together such events as the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I and 9/11 as being Black Swans. To that list, the argument can be made (and it isn’t always clear that Taleb’s required triplet of rarity, extreme impact and retrospective predictability has been satisfied) that the Indian Ocean tsunami, hurricane Katrina, the Haiti earthquake, the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano eruption and the BP oil spill not to mention the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the sub-prime mortgage crisis and late-2000s recession and the now unfolding European sovereign debt crisis should be added to the list.

An explanation for “just about everything”
Taleb apparently wants black swan event status more judiciously applied but welcomes a full appreciation for the role that such events have played on the development of humans and their civilizations. In an interview with The New York Times, he argued, “A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.”

As the planet’s population keeps adding billions, more and more people are destined to find themselves unexpectedly thrown into the path of the highly improbable. Thus Taleb has staked out a growth industry that he currently has almost all to himself. Overthrowing the rule of the “quants” is going to require a full-scale paradigm shift (which will probably, in retrospect, turn out to be a Black Swan!). As financial reformers in the Obama Administration and the Congress have discovered, there’s simply too much power to be challenged and too much money to be made by people who claim to know how to predict and control the future.

Hopefully, Taleb has only just begun. Now that he’s riveted the attention of people (like my pro-active seatmate on Flight 569) on the importance of paying attention to unexpected events of large magnitude and impact, he needs to take his genius, impatience with the status quo and his salty joie de vivre on to the next, next challenge: helping humanity find better ways to prepare for what it can’t see coming.

The reigning black swan expert is …
And Taleb appears to be headed that way. A 2nd (paperback) edition of The Black Swan was released earlier this week by Taleb’s publisher. It contains (or so Taleb himself claims on his website) about 100 new pages on robustness and fragility. I’ve only read an excerpt. But it is clear that Taleb has been doing a lot of thinking about how best to merge skepticism and decision-making in the real world. He’s gone looking for clues in how other complex systems have managed to deal with black swan events and survive. And what he’s found in Mother Nature has blown him away.

He writes on the newest pages of his book:

“Mother Nature is clearly a complex system, with webs of interdependence, nonlinearities, and a robust ecology (otherwise it would have blown up a long time ago). It is an old, very old person with an impeccable memory. Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s—actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments,
and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.

“Let me summarize my ideas about how Mother Nature deals with the
Black Swan, both positive and negative—it knows much better than humans
how to take advantage of positive Black Swans. First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies.”

And he’s off and running.

With Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it is always likely to be a wild ride, except when you are having a leisurely chat about his provocative claims and discoveries on your flight from Tampa to Chicago. Then it may turn out to be merely a pleasant surprise.

This bipolar irregularity no doubt caused me to miss a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as a sci-fic fan and may have caused me to miss a unique opportunity as a writer. Because one of the greats of American science fiction writing joined the English faculty of my alma mater, Eastern New Mexico University, while I was enrolled there. It was a small school, but even so, I still blew right past the fact that I could have studied science fiction writing as taught by one of the winners of the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Grand Master of Science Fiction Writing award. The first honoree was Heinlein. The second was Jack Williamson of Elida, New Mexico.

Lately, I’ve been away. Again. Though I am aware of the availability of new sci-fi TV series like Fringe, Heroes and FlashForward, nothing has really captivated me sci-fi-wise on the TV screen or book page since The X-Files.

And probably this sleeping dog would still be slumbering had not an odd-sounding post showed up the other day in a Yahoo Group I belong to. The writer is a highly placed government bureaucrat. A really powerful one in scientific research circles, if for no other reason because he presides over who gets multi-million-dollar government research grants. So he’s an accomplished veteran at eviscerating claims by others with whom he disagrees, and he does so regularly in this online community. But here he was, speaking with an unaccustomed tentativeness approaching raw awe.

His story had to do with his viewing the second of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator movies, the ones in which post-apocalyptic artificially intelligent machines seek to exterminate what is left of a human race. What totally “creeped” him out about this movie, said this Washington bureaucrat, was that it contained several scenes that tracked real events and people in his life and career so faithfully and accurately that it felt like he was being spied on. Fresh on his mind, too, was one of the findings of his agency about good predictors of which emerging technologies would pan out (and should be funded) and which wouldn’t (and shouldn’t be). One finding was that new technologies treated as being favorable to humans in science fiction plots “somehow mysteriously prospered more than you would have expected.” (I’m not posting a link to his comments, since the group is private.)

I don’t know whether he was being spied on or not (he thinks not, after thinking about it.) But what about the U.S. government’s finding that if science fiction thinks well of something being possible in the real world, it has a better than otherwise chance of really happening? Does, in fact, science fiction have a good track record of predicting anything? And does, in fact, anyone take science fiction very seriously anymore? I went looking for answers or, at minimum, opinions. Here’s a CliffsNotes’ version of what I found:

Science fiction requires an optimistic audience, so in a world of growing pessimism, as a viable literary category, science fiction may be dying.
This is the view of George R. R. Martin, who writes both sci-fi and fantasy novels. Sci-fi was in its heydays in the 1950s and 1960s, he observes. The future was an appealing place—one some people couldn’t wait to get to. They thought that their children and grandchildren would be better off and happier there. Now he says, people worry about ecological problems, global warming, the growing instability of the world with nuclear proliferation. He says, “People no longer believe on some level that the future is going to be a good place and they prefer to read about other times and other places that are maybe not so scary as science fiction.”

The real and the fictional worlds have become so interwoven that good sci-fi writing gets lost in the hoopla, the buncombe and macabre of the potentially real. The new ABC series, FlashForward, is based on Canadian sci-fi author Robert J. Sawyer’s acclaimed book of that title. In it, two scientists at the European CERN particule accelerator accidentally transport the world’s consciousness 21 years into the future, then return it a couple of minutes later. Naturally, the sudden memories of what is to be terrorize humanity. The best-seller thriller Angels and Demons has Vatican City under threat from a bomb made of anti-matter stolen from CERN. Another best-seller, Blasphemy, has a mad physicist trying to use a CERN-like particle accelerator to talk with God. Then along comes two halfway reputable physicists with a real theory about an experiment CERN hopes to do with its problem-beset new accelerator. They believe that the illusive sub-atomic particle, the Higgs boson, may be so “abhorrent to nature” that it could cause the natural world to try to reverse-engineer reality and wipe out the experimental apparatus trying to create it. They suggest that this might explain the serious mishaps that have struck the Swiss project. So … which is “the science fiction”?

Even science fiction writers have been disappointed that more of their predictions and expectations have not panned out. One candid enough to say so is the oft-honored Frederik Pohl, who has written sci-fi for more than 70 years (he celebrates birthday No. 90 on November 26). Very little of what science fiction has described, he says, has come to pass. “You can’t jump into your spaceship and fly off to Mars and have adventures with six-limbed green Martians, riding floats. It isn’t going to happen. There aren’t any,” he says. “I’m really kind of disappointed. I wish that we had had the right kind of spacecraft. And it doesn’t look like now they’re ever going to happen, or at least not in the immediate future, by which I mean, the time before the sun goes out.”

No matter how hard they try, writers of science fiction can’t escape the influence of the bigger social trends (biases, political correctnesses) of their times. And this isn’t necessarily good for their work. Sci-fi/fantasy writer Jo Walton makes this case in talking about Heinlein’s juvenile work, Time for the Stars, published in 1956. She suggests if Heinlein had written the work recently, “it would have been a different book in almost every way.” For example, earthlings wouldn’t be going out to exploit the galaxy. Earth would be dying because of global warming and pollution, not simple over-population. The book would focus on relationships, not adventure. Characters would have more sex, treated very differently. The odd incestuous relationship between Tom and his great-great-niece Vicky would be more explicitly sexualized at long distance and contain more angst. Says Walton, “I’d read it, but I probably wouldn’t keep coming back to it.” In other words, its topicality would have diminished its appeal, something some critics suggest is happening a lot to science fiction these days.

Prophesy and prophets that take themselves seriously—Nostrademas included—are usually delusional, but some science fiction reader/critics are concerned that sci-fi writers not back away from the prophetical challenge. James Wallace Harris worries, “Personally, I think science fiction is at a turning point—at a cusp—like when a religion turns from revelation to dogma.” He is captivated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s arguments in The Black Swan against trying to predict the future. (The black swan is Taleb’s brilliant metaphor for a future that seems to be predictable only in hindsight.) But Harris is also concerned that science fiction writers not discount their value as writers of philosophical fiction. That is, fiction that helps us imagine purposeful “black swans” useful in explaining why our species may be the first to come fully awake (in Harris’s words) “in the infinite foam of multiverse reality.”

And all this doesn’t really begin to do justice to the cacophonous debate under way about the health, the role, the purity (or the contamination), the state and the fate or the coolness or uncoolness of science fiction today. Is it true that science fiction has become too feminine in no small part because its ranks have been invaded by feminists? Is it true that science fiction perennially “eats its best”—that is, automatically redefines its most talented writers as being writers of some other type of literature the moment they become recognized or canonized? Is it true that some of the best sci-fi writers—Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, Margaret Atwood—are, or were, right to resist the idea that they write science fiction at all?

Obviously a lot has been going on since I last paid much attention. I think I’ll go rent a copy of Blade Runner and get back in the hunt.