Occasionally, a conversation changes the way you think. More than 20 years ago, a Lloyd’s underwriter told me: “The threat to this market is not a Japanese earthquake. We know that will happen. The threat comes from the risks we never imagined.” That was my introduction to the idea that Nassim Taleb would successfully popularise as the “black swan”. The distinction between “known unknowns”, the things we know we don’t know, and “unknown unknowns”, the things we don’t know we don’t know, has been part of my thinking ever since.
有時候，一次談話會改變你的思維方式。20多年前，勞合社(Lloyd’s)一名保險商告訴我：“這個市場面臨的威脅不是日本地震。我們知道日本會發(fā)生地震。我們面臨的威脅來自我們從未想象到的風(fēng)險。”那是我第一次開始接觸納西姆?塔勒布(Nassim Taleb)可能將成功推廣的想法——“黑天鵝理論”。從那以后，我一直在思考“已知的未知”——我們知道自己所不了解的東西，與“未知的未知”——我們不知道的自己所不了解的東西之間的區(qū)別。