The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
From BookJive
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| Author: | Nassim Nicholas Taleb |
| Publisher: | Random House |
| Published: | |
| Pages: | 400 |
| ISBN-10: | 1400063515 |
| Category: | Array |
People were once convinced that all swans were white. In their minds, it was an unassailable fact, back by all evidence. But no matter how certain the Old World was that all Swans are white, there were actually undiscovered black swans swimming around. To learn something from observation alone is severely limiting. After all, observational knowledge is extremely fragile. It takes only a single example to the contrary and millennia of “empirical evidence” become absolutely meaningless. Millions of confirmed sightings of a white swan don’t prove a thing in the face of one black swan. Suddenly the world can no longer hold onto the belief that swans are white, and everything changes in an instant.
So what is empirical reality? We experience many “black swan” events in life. They can be identified with the following three elements: First, a “black swan” is an outlier. It exists outside the realm of common expectation. Nothing from the past points to it being a possibility. Second, it bears a tremendous impact. Third, although it is an outlier, our human nature leads us to believe—in hindsight—that we saw it coming all along. In summary, a black swan event is rare, has a powerful impact, and seems predictable only in hindsight.
Conversely, the highly expected not occurring is also a Black Swan. In other words, something highly improbably happening, is basically the same as something highly probable not coming to pass, in terms “black swan events”.
It only takes a few Black Swans explain nearly everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Black Swan events have been around since the world began, but now that humans are living in the technological age—causing the world to become more complex—they are becoming increasingly common.
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