An ontological investigation of unimaginable events

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that certain unpredictable Black Swan events are inevitable under mild assumptions, revealing fundamental limitations in decision-making models and highlighting a deeper form of uncertainty than traditionally recognized.

Contribution

It provides a formal ontological framework proving the inevitability of Black Swan events and shows the incompleteness of computational decision models under uncertainty.

Findings

Black Swan events must necessarily occur under mild assumptions

Computational decision models are inherently incomplete

A stronger form of uncertainty than Knightian uncertainty is identified

Abstract

We show that, under mild assumptions, some unimaginable events - which we refer to as Black Swan events - must necessarily occur. It follows as a corollary of our theorem that any computational model of decision-making under uncertainty is incomplete in the sense that not all events that occur can be taken into account. In the context of decision theory we argue that this constitutes a stronger sense of uncertainty than Knightian uncertainty.