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The Black Swan
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The Black Swan (2007) (edit title/settings)

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black... read more

Summary edit see section history

Highly improbable and unpredictable events are the main drivers of change in society and as such forming predictions of future events or developing explanations for past events is futile. If you go around using the words “will” or “because” you’re a very silly boy.

What's to be done if... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Highly improbable and unpredictable events are the main drivers of change in society and as such forming predictions of future events or developing explanations for past events is futile. If you go around using the words “will” or “because” you’re a very silly boy.

What's to be done if predicting is futile? 1. Put oneself in +ve black swans' (opportunity's) way and out of -ve black swans way. 2. Dumbell portfolio: mix of ultra safe and exrtreme upside.

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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.”
  • “Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risk.”
Show all 15 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

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First Sentence edit see section history

This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Prologue

Part One: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, or How We Seek Validation
Chapter 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic
Chapter 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan
Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute
Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy
Chapter 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope
Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence
Chapter 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd

Part Two: We Just Can't Predict
Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction
Chapter 11: How to Look for Bird Poop
Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream
Chapter 13: Appelies the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?

Part Three: Those Gray Swans of Extremistan
Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back
Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud
Chapter 16: The Aestetics of Randomness
Chapter 17: Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places
Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony
Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan

Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans

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

This book is in Amazon Book Club Picks. (authoritative list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Random House
Country: United States
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
ISBN: 978-1400063512
Page Count: 366

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: Q375 .T35 2007
  • Dewey: 003.54

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history

   
  • The Numerati
  • Too Big to Know

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