The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)

thanks to the power of posterior information. (In a remarkable insight, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire compared our memory to a palimpsest, a type of parchment on which old texts can be erased and new ones written over them.) Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembere

Let’s assume that Amazon.com does not exist, and that you have written a sophisticated book. Odds are that a very small bookstore that carries only 5,000 volumes will not be interested in letting your “beautifully crafted prose” occupy premium shelf space. And the megabookstore, such as the average American Barnes & Noble, might stock 130,000 v

Strangely, Hume during his day was not mainly known for the works that generated his current reputation—he became rich and famous through writing a bestselling history of England. Ironically, when Hume was alive, his philosophical works, to which we now attach his fame, “fell deadborn off the presses,” while the works for which he was famous at the

Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky. Luck is the grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist governments protected their monsters and, by doing so, killed potential newcomers in the womb.

To borrow from Warren Buffett, don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut—and don’t ask an academic if what he does is relevant. So I’ll end this discussion of Hayek’s libertarianism

will discuss in Chapters 15 and 16. Concentration of this kind is not limited to the Internet; it appears in social life (a small number of people are connected to others), in electricity grids, in communications networks. This seems to make networks more robust: random insults to most parts of the network will not be consequential since they are l

The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are: a. the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is

Surprisingly, the book that influenced me was not written by someone in the thinking business but by a journalist: William Shirer’s Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941. Shirer was a radio correspondent, famous for his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It occurred to me that the Journal offered an unusual perspec

these events do not have to be instantaneous surprises. Some of the historical fractures I mention in Chapter 1 have lasted a few decades, like, say, the computer that brought consequential effects on society without its invasion of our lives being noticeable from day to day. Some Black Swans can come from the slow building up of incremental change

It struck me, a belief that has never left me since, that we are just a great machine for looking backward, and that humans are great at self-delusion. Every year that goes by