[huntse]

Well perhaps. So let's think about it. Black swans are not rare, they were thought to be completely impossible, and then people found them not to be impossible. So far maybe not so correct.

Secondly, regarding insight. This idea which everyone credits to Taleb is of course described all over the place. For example, as "the impossibility of inductive reasoning in the natural sciences" in The Mathematical Experience. As far as fat tails are concerned, every textbook on financial maths I own talks about fat tails the corrections that must be made to account for them, and they were all published before either of Taleb's books.