The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Meghnad Saha: Add a description of this character.

Quotes edit see section history

• “A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world”

• “If you want to see what I mean by the arbitrariness of categories, check the situation of polarized politics. The next time a Martian visits earth, try to explain to him why those who favor allowing the elimination of a fetus in the mother's womb also oppose capital punishment. Or try to explain to him why those who accept abortion are supposed to be favorable to high taxation but against a strong military. Why do those who prefer sexual freedom need to be against individual economic liberty? p. 16”

• “The problem here, with the universe and the human race, is that we are the surviving Casanovas”

• “You do not look for something particular every morning but work hard to let contingency enter your working life”

• “I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst - those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. p. 291”

• “What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.”

• “We lack imagination and we repress it in others.”

• “It is one thing to be cosmetically defiant of authority by wearing unconventional clothes--what social scientists and economists call 'cheap signaling'--and another to prove willingness to translate belief into action.”

• “Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as 'uncultured,' 'unintellectual,' and 'poor in math' because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call 'high culture'--like knowledge of Goethe's inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting.”

• “The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.”

• “...that understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”

• “(But) it remains the case that you know what is wrong with a lot more confidence than you know what is right. All pieces of information are not equal in importance.”

• “But don’t play chess to practice skepticism. Scientists believe that it is the search for their own weaknesses that makes them good chess players, not the practice of chess that turns them into skeptics. Similarly, the speculator George Soros, when making a financial bet, keeps looking for instances that would prove his initial theory wrong. This, perhaps, is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one’s ego.”

• “Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

  Highlighted by 741 Kindle customers

• In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.

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• Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.

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• the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they “Platonify.”

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• The payoff of a human venture is, in general, inversely proportional to what it is expected to be.

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• The Platonic fold is the explosive boundary where the Platonic mind-set enters in contact with messy reality, where the gap between what you know and what you think you know becomes dangerously wide. It is here that the Black Swan is produced.

  Highlighted by 550 Kindle customers

• When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.

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• The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

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• Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

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• What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Mediocristan: A virtual place under the bell curve where the majority-centrist opinion or response shapes future events. Everything is mostly-average in Mediocristan.
• Extremistan: The real world, where rare 'black swan' events occurring in the tails or extreme limits of the bell curve disproportionately influence future events.
• New York City
• Lebanon
• France
• London
• United States
• Brooklyn
• Paris
• Manhattan
• Italy
• Russia
• California
• Carthage
• India
• Europe
• Beirut
• Rome
• Sydney Opera House

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Glossary edit see section history

• black swan: an event so extremly unlikely virtually nobody can forsee it happening.

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The Black Swan: The unpredicted and unpredictable event. Rare, of extreme impact, and laden with retrospective predictability.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Nassim Taleb (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 003.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Add a note to help parents select a book for a child.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Nonfiction › Social Sciences › Library & Information Science › Information Science
• Books › Business & Investing › Management & Leadership › Management
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Epistemology
• Books › Computers & Internet › Computer Science

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history