Statistical natural language processing is a very prominent example of a field which has developed effective methods for coping with "black swans" or the occurance of improbable events that have never been seen before.

If you take any large corpus of text and start counting the frequencies that different words occur you will rapidly notice that a huge fraction of the words have never been seen before or occur only once. Biblical scholars called these words hapax legomena instead of black swans. Methods for estimating the probabilities of these events go back to Alan Turning and his codebreaking work at Blechley Park. One need not assign zero probability to unseen events a la maximum likelihood.

Taleb's rants against VAR and mediocristan have always seemed like borderline straw man bashing to me. Sure there are many fools who believe in the gaussian or lognormal returns model, but the best knowledge in the field doesn't make these assumptions. Why doesn't he give authors like bouchard and potters who have built on mandelbrot's work their due? or does he?