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If you had asked 17th century Europeans about swans, they would have told you that “all swans are white”. This was a scientific truth. There were no black swans. We were completely certain of it.

At least we were until 1697 when explorers landed on Australia and, oh crap, black swans are discovered.

This is the story that Nassim Taleb tells in his book The Black Swan. He applies it to economic theory and uses it to explain why humans behave why we do. The jist of the argument is that things are far more unpredictable than we really know. (I haven’t read the book, and I’m not endorsing it. I only mention it because I like the illustration and want to use it to make another point.)

The world is far more chaotic and unpredictable, at least to us, than we really care to admit, and this is a pretty fundamental human fault. You see, if all your life you only ever saw white swans, you would tend to think that all swans are white. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Reasonable but wrong.

With every white swan you ran into, you’d become more and more convinced that all swans are white. But that’s the trick! We take every white swan we see as further confirmation of our white swan theory, when in reality it isn’t.

How many white swans would you have to see before you proved that “all swans are white”? You would have to see all of them. Seeing one more does not lend any extra credence to your theory. It’s an impossible theory. You would have to know about every swan on earth to prove your theory (impossible) but you only have to know about one black swan to disprove it.

And that’s really the mind trick. Every white swan we see makes us perceive the statement “all swans are white” as being confirmed when in reality it is impossible to actually prove.

So if this is just natural human nature playing its role out, that means we are very confident about things we really don’t know much about.

Now, let’s move on from a trivial subject like feathers on a bird and look instead at something more substantial: the resurrection of Jesus.

I’ve heard from many people that are using faulty white swan reasoning unawares. They’re the ones who say, “Dead people stay dead. Therefore Jesus didn’t rise from the dead.”

This theory is very, very convincing. I don’t know about you, but all the dead people I know have, so far at least, remained dead. All of them. It would be tempting to expand my experience and say, “Well, that must mean that all people everywhere die and stay dead.” Tempting, but wrong. Just like with the black swan example, all it would take is one single case of a person rising from the dead to disprove this whole worldview. Our confidence is misplaced because it is an impossible statement to prove. We do not know about every dead person on earth (it’s impossible), so it’s impossible to make statements about them with certainty. We feel like there is certainty, but that is the mind trick.

Certainly no one would say that rising from the dead is the norm. And for Europeans, the norm certainly had nothing to do with black swans. But don’t get logical dyslexia and confuse “uncommon” with “impossible”.