Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

The Black Swan

Overview

Subtitled The Impact of the Highly Improbable. A black swan is an event that lies outside regular expectation, carries an extreme impact, and is explained after the fact so that it looks as if it was predictable. Taleb argues that history, markets and lives are dominated by such events, that our statistical tools assume a world of mild variation ("Mediocristan") when much of the world is governed by extreme variation ("Extremistan"), and that experts in these domains are systematically overconfident. The book covers the narrative fallacy, the problem of silent evidence, the ludic fallacy of treating life as a casino with known odds, and the turkey who concludes from a thousand days of feeding that humans are benevolent.

Notes

The chapter on silent evidence is the best treatment of survivorship bias I know, and the turkey is the problem of induction in a form that sticks. Taleb's core point, that the absence of a catastrophe so far is weak evidence against catastrophe, is the correct way to think about tail risks and about why luck plays a larger part in success than the successful believe. The book was published a year before the 2008 crash, which did its reputation no harm. It is also repetitive, score-settling and rude about everyone, and it would have been better at half the length. Read it anyway.

Also see