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

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

that crazy after the events. This retrospective plausibility causes a discounting of the rarity and conceivability of the event. I later saw the exact same illusion of understanding in business success and the financial markets.

I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the more vicious hidden ones. I worry less about terrorism than about diabetes, less about matters people usually worry about because they are obvious worries, and more about matters that lie outside our consciousness and common discourse (I also have to confess that I do not worry a l

Now, there are other themes arising from our blindness to the Black Swan: a. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation. b. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy. c. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist:

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

knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously. Let us call an antischolar—someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or ev

The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems outside philosophy…. Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted outside philosophy and they die if these roots decay…. [emphasis mine] These roots are easily forgot

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

Half the time I am hyperconservative in the conduct of my own affairs; the other half I am hyperaggressive. This may not seem exceptional, except that my conservatism applies to what others call risk taking, and my aggressiveness to areas where others recommend caution.