The Black Swan

And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspaper actually decrease your knowledge of the world?

I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.

At some point during his speech, he turned all red with anger—thus convincing me (and the audience) that he was definitely right.

Unlike Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, Hume is the kind of thinker who is sometimes read by the person mentioning his work.

Indeed, people tend to fool themselves with their self-narrative of “national identity,” which, in a breakthrough paper in Science by sixty-five authors, was shown to be a total fiction. (“National traits” might be great for movies, they might help a lot with war, but they are Platonic notions that carry no empirical validity—yet, for example, both

induction, which is the technical name for the Black Swan.

You are very likely to be fooled about their intentions.

Note that the designation f*** you corresponds to the exhilarating ability to pronounce that compact phrase before hanging up the phone.

The Black Swans we imagine, discuss, and worry about do not resemble those likely to be Black Swans. We worry about the wrong “improbable” events, as we will see next.