The Black Swan

there is no way to derive profits from traded securities

Narrativity can viciously affect the remembrance of past events as follows: we will tend to more easily remember those facts from our past that fit a narrative, while we tend to neglect others that do not appear to play a causal role in that narrative.

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.

Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers.

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

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

People imagine us skeptics and empiricists to be morose, paranoid, and tortured in our private lives, which may be the exact opposite of what history (and my private experience) reports. Like many of the skeptics I hang around with, Hume was jovial and a bon vivant, eager for literary fame, salon company, and pleasant conversation.

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.

I derived an unexpected amount of enjoyment writing this book—in fact, it just wrote itself—and I hope that the reader will experience the same. I confess that I got hooked on this withdrawal into pure ideas after the constraints of an active and transactional life. After this book is published, my aim is to spend time away from the clutter of publ