The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007)

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  • Triplet of opacity
    1. The illusion of understanding.
    2. The retrospective distortion.
    3. The overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people.
  • Blindness from black swan events
      1. We focus on preselected segments of the seen and generalize from it to the unseen: the error of confirmation. 
      2. We fool ourselves with stories that cater to our Platonic thirst for distinct patterns: the narrative fallacy. 
      3. We behave as if the Black Swan does not exist: human nature is not programmed for Black Swans. 
      4. What we see is not necessarily all that is there. History hides Black Swans from us and gives us a mistaken idea about the odds of these events: this is the distortion of silent evidence.make a distinction between positive contingencies and negative ones
      5. We "tunnel": that is, we focus on a few well-defined sources of uncertainty, on too specific a list of Black Swans (at the expense of the others that do not easily come to mind).
    • "A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush."
    • Modest tips
      1. Make a distinction between positive contingencies and negative ones.
      2. Don't look for the precise and the local.
      3. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity.
      4. Beware of precise plans by governments.
      5. Do not waste your time trying to fight forecasters, stock analysts, economists, and social scientists, except to play pranks on them.
    • Matthew effect: the rich get richer.

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