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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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I think it qualifies as a black swan even if Voldemort set it up. Black swans are just extremely rare, hard to predict events with huge consequences.
(Missing grandparent was mine; I deleted it when I read further in the thread and discovered that Yvain had already made my point, and done a better job than I had.)
If what actually happened was that Voldemort cast the killing curse and it bounced, then yes, that'd be a black swan. But I think it's more likely that he didn't cast the killing curse on Harry at all - he just set it up to look like he did and then went underground, as part of some larger plan. If that counts as a black swan, many complicated plots would too, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen the term used that way.
How complicated does a plot need to be? 9/11 is the standard black swan, and took fairly complicated plotting, though it doesn't involve the level of misdirection that you're attributing to Voldemort.
It may just be a case of me not being fully aware of the common uses of the term, then.
I would consider 9/11 a black swan event from the US's perspective, but not from al-Quaeda's - it's rare for a terrorist group to make (or at least succeed at) a display of that scale, but it's not hard to predict such things when you're the one planning them, and that seems to me to be the more relevant characteristic. The term also seems to be used specifically for events with primarily negative outcomes. So, in the case of Harry Potter, the traditional take on the event would be a black swan from Voldemort's perspective - rare, unpredictable, and deadly - but it wouldn't be a black swan from the perspective of the rest of the wizarding world, because the outcome was good for them. If I'm right about MoR, the event still isn't perceived as a black swan by the majority of the wizarding world (because the outcome appears to be good), but it wasn't a black swan for V, either. (It would be perceived as a black swan event by the Death Eaters, but I'm considering V's perspective to be the relevant one.)
But, like I said, I may have my definition a bit wrong.