So I pumped every displaced person I could find for information on their behavior during exile. Almost all act in the same way.

I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability.

All zoogles are boogles. You saw a boogle. Is it a zoogle? Not necessarily, since not all boogles are zoogles; adolescents who make a mistake in answering this kind of question on their SAT test might not make it to college. Yet another person can get very high scores on the SATs and still feel a chill of fear when someone from the wrong side of to

fragility

This is sometimes called “f*** you money,” which, in spite of its coarseness, means that it allows you to act like a Victorian gentleman, free from slavery. It is a psychological buffer: the capital is not so large as to make you spoiled-rich, but large enough to give you the freedom to choose a new occupation without excessive consideration of the

Go through the following exercise. Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of

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.

Every single day brought occurrences that lay completely outside their forecast, but they could not figure out that they had not forecast them.

This simple inability to remember not the true sequence of events but a reconstructed one will make history appear in hindsight to be far more explainable than it actually was—or is.