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

allows the fixation of an unrevised perception and enables us to later study events in their own context. Again, it is the purported method of description of the event, not its execution, that was important. In fact, it is likely that Shirer and his editors did some cheating, since the book was published in 1941 and publishers, I am told, are in th

Philadelphia, where I lived. A second-year Wharton student told me to get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor. It was a very simple way to discriminate among professions and, from that, to generalize a separation between types of uncertai

“experts”?), you need to put a portion, say 85 to 90 percent, in extremely safe instruments, like Treasury bills—as safe a class of instruments as you can manage to find on this planet. The remaining 10 to 15 percent you put in extremely speculative bets, as leveraged as possible (like options), preferably venture capital–style portfolios.*42 That

We harbor a crippling dislike for the abstract. One day in December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, Bloomberg News flashed the following headline at 13:01: U.S. TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM. Whenever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the “reason.” Half an hour later, they had to issue a

composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And globalization has

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

In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you

what’s going on. There are: a) epistemic arrogance and our corresponding future blindness; b) the Platonic notion of categories, or how people are fooled by reductions, particularly if they have an academic degree in an expert-free discipline; and, finally c) flawed tools of inference, particularly the Black Swan–free tools from Mediocristan.