English

An ontological investigation of unimaginable events

Risk Management 2018-06-26 v3 Logic

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.02570,
  title  = {An ontological investigation of unimaginable events},
  author = {Thomas Santoli and Christoph Siebenbrunner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.02570},
  year   = {2018}
}