Adapted from pg. 571 of Alcoholics Anonymous, 4th Edition
The Black Swan Sanctuary will become a unique and highly successful approach to that age-old public health and social problem, following the crowd... In emphasizing Black Swanism as an integral component of the human genome, the social stigma associated with this condition will be blotted out... "Historians may one day recognize (BSS) to have been a great venture in social pioneering which forged a new instrument for social action; a new therapy based on the kinship of common suffering; on having a vast potential for the myriad of ills of (hu)mankind."
Adapted 1 July 2011 while in ceremony
Excerpted from Black Swan theory Wikipedia page:
The phrase "black swan" derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is the poet Juvenal's characterization of something being "rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno" ("a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan"; 6.165).[4] In English, when the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the simile lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the phrase's underlying logic, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.
Juvenal's phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.[5] In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,[6] the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven. Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Millused the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.[7]
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