# black elephant > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [200]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Web page), 2009 (year of the work, not of publication), https://wordspy.com/words/black-elephant. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Defines black elephant, the ignored-risk idea behind planning for mass displacement. - Career works it belongs to: - Black Elephant (2009): The black elephant: a foreseeable disaster that institutions ignore and later call a black swan. Coined by... - Stampeding Black Elephants (2014): Thomas L. Friedman's New York Times column on black elephants. (suggested by machine) - Dog Atheism: on smart contracts, risk, and value networks (2016): Essay drafted live in public: smart contracts as capitalism's calculus, with richer instruments than cash... (suggested by machine) - Taming Black Elephants (2017): Singapore's former civil service head took up the black elephant idea in a lecture series and book. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series. - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Black elephants, complexity & Singapore (100%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: black elephants (4 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Black Elephant (4 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Collapsonomics (1 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); cyber (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2009) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): cyber; black elephants - Importance: core-text score 0.15 (1.00 is the top), number 416 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [117] [The Black Elephant Lapel Pin & Logo | Metalabel (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/117.md): same career work: Black Elephant - [128] [Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md): same career work: Black Elephant - On the same works, just after: [128] [Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md); [823] [Plausible Utopias (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/823.md); [18] [Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/18.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: black elephant, document, 2009, https://wordspy.com/words/black-elephant; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [200], https://guptaoption.com/texts/200.md. ## Passages [passage 1](https://wordspy.com/words/black-elephant) n. An unlikely but significant risk that everyone knows about, but no one wants to discuss. Etymology black swan + elephant in the room Examples 2015 Cybersecurity is like a "black elephant" — a dangerous crossbreed between the "black swan" risk (capable of producing unexpected outcomes with enormous consequences) and the "elephant in the room" (a large problem that is in plain sight). —David N. Lawrence, “ We Don’t Need a Crisis to Act Unitedly Against Cyber Threats ,” Knowledge@Wharton , June 01, 2015 2014 “Currently,” said Sweidan, "there are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there" — global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive fresh water pollution. "When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now." —Thomas L. Friedman, “ Stampeding Black Elephants ,” The New York Times , November 22, 2014 2011 Likewise, Samra also ignored the more recent black swans, the financial collapse of 2008 and its continuing aftermath, as well as the rise of China as an economic power without an independent central bank — events so recent and so significant that to overlook them is more like missing a black elephant than a black swan. —Timothy A. Canova, “ Black Swans and Black Elephants in Plain Sight: An Empirical Review of Central Bank and Independence ,” Chapman Law Review , March 17, 2011 2009 (earliest) The reason the Government cannot admit it is that it has a very large impact and would necessitate hard choices they don’t want to take this side of an election — ie its treated as a "Black Swan" but is actually far more likely than that to occur — what Lloyd Davis coined as a "Black Elephant" event. —Alan Patrick, “ Black Elephant Strategy and Collapsonomics ,” Broadstuff , April 25, 2009 Notes "Good day, dear friend ; where do you come from?" "From the Museum, where I have spent three hours. I saw everything they have there, and examined it carefully. So much have I seen to astonish me, that, if you will believe me, I am neither strong enough nor clever enough to give you a full description of it. Upon my word it is a palace of wonders. How rich Nature is in invention! What birds and beasts haven't I seen there! What flies, butterflies, cockroaches, little bits of beetles! some like emeralds, others like coral. And what tiny cochineal insects! Why, really, some of them are smaller than a pin's head." "But did you see the elephant? What did you think of it? I’ll be bound you felt as if you were at a mountain." "The elephant? Are you quite sure it is there?" "Quite sure." "Well, brother, you mustn’t be too hard on me; but to tell the truth, I didn’t remark the elephant." —Ivan & Krylov, “The Inquisitive Man,” January 01, 1814 Filed Under idioms economics environment Some Related Words black swan de-elephant apocalypse [passage 2](https://wordspy.com/words/black-elephant) you felt as if you were at a mountain." "The elephant? Are you quite sure it is there?" "Quite sure." "Well, brother, you mustn’t be too hard on me; but to tell the truth, I didn’t remark the elephant." —Ivan & Krylov, “The Inquisitive Man,” January 01, 1814 Filed Under idioms economics environment Some Related Words black swan de-elephant apocalypse fatigue dread merchant practocalypse tipping element x-risk blue goo chief risk officer panic merchants threat fatigue AI-pocalypse Posted: March 22, 2016 --- End of [200] black elephant. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [128](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md) Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010); the most closely related, [117](https://guptaoption.com/texts/117.md) The Black Elephant Lapel Pin & Logo | Metalabel (2009); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.