Is that correct? Here's the definition I was able to find by Taleb for black swans:
"First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme 'impact'. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable."
That makes it sound not like the we fail to predict individual black swans because of cognitive biases, but that after the fact our cognitive biases lead us to we convince ourselves they could have been predicted. However, I haven't read Taleb's books in any depth. I attempted Antifragile once but simply disliked his writing style too much to make it through to the end, even though I think there were some useful ideas contained within. Anyway, please do tell me if I'm misunderstanding the core concept by taking the one quote from him out of context.
It is nuanced, he's written a couple books on the topic, and it is hard to explain or unpack in a few sentences. You're pretty much right. The reason why I said "don't
often see them ahead of time" because cognitive bias is part of the definition.* For example, many people assume that stock returns are normal, because that's how they learned how to calculate standard deviations. But they aren't normal. That's an example of a cognitive bias blinding you to a potential problem.
There is a parallel discussion to this in another thread. A poster is trying to reduce risk by reducing volatility--which lots of people do. Even Michael Kitces who I think is great does this. However, that's wrong. Taleb points out that real risk comes from things like the banking crisis, which is totally outside the "volatility is risk model." So if you are say, selecting a portfolio of low-volatility banking stocks, thinking lower volatility is safer, your cognitive biases will cause you to over look the possibility of real risks. Some people saw the banking crisis coming so it wasn't impossible to predict, but most people didn't.
Edit: Of course, this is all hair splitting anyway. I'm sure we're all in agreement there are risks out there that we don't know about. If we don't know about them, it is hard to plan for them. I'm personally just putting the possibility of a Black Swan event in the "too hard" pile and calling it good.
And I agree with you. I don't really like his writing style either.
"not often" probably wasn't the right phrase. Maybe "very rarely" would have been better.