Black Swans: Stories

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Despite (or perhaps because of) their extreme unpredictability, they compel human beings to account for them—to explain after the fact that they were in fact predictable. Hume ... puts to shame almost all current thinkers, and certainly the entire German graduate curriculum." A lot of blogs said a lot of nice things about this book, and from this I conclude that most of those bloggers either A) strictly read the executive summary or B) only read other bloggers. This is a pretty terrible book, and while it has one or two good ideas, they are better and more rigorously expressed in books like "Sway" or "The Drunkard's Walk" than they are in this shameless exercise in self promotion. In Mediocristan, randomness is highly constrained, and deviations from the average are minor. Physical characteristics such as height and weight are from Mediocristan: They have upper and lower bounds, their distribution is a bell curve, and even the tallest or lightest human being isn’t much taller or lighter than the average. In Mediocristan, prediction is possible.

In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average. We are social animals" - how true is this statement! I never realized this until I worked more than a year from home. I have always considered myself somewhat antisocial, but I was proved wrong. When I returned to the office, I felt like I was in vacation, and this feeling didn't left me yet. And I don't have problems at home, it's just that I never realize how much I missed my colleagues, friends, our jokes and interactions. Above statement has a continuation: "hell is other people" - also true, but some of them can be heaven too: a sparkling conversation, a good joke, a meaninful look, a kind gesture, a shared moment - all these can make someone feel good for a long time. Ultimately, our world and future are unknowable and unpredictable because of various factors, including: Many of the major turning points in your personal life (e.g. how you met your spouse, your biggest gains and losses) were also likely to have been unexpected, i.e. they didn’t come from standard events on your daily schedule. The author, Taleb, rails against economics, most philosophers, and the way we incorporate news to allow us to make sense of events and everyday happenings. He wants us to unlearn the way we think and learn, while destroying the modern beliefs in statistics and at the same time eviscerating the nobel prize winners who got us to where we are today.

Taleb 2007 PROLOGUE p.xxvii, Taleb call this human tendency the narrative fallacy: we seem to enjoy stories, and we seem to want to remember stories for their own sake. This read like if Kit from Pretty Woman, or ummm Vivian, played by Julia Robert’s character in the film, wrote stories of their lives and their friends before she meets Richard Gere and goes nowhere. Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that is it not so simple; be suspicious of the "because" and handle it with care — particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence." pgs 120-121 He would like for us to realize our overuse of normal-curve thinking, which makes us minimize risk and have no expectations out of the ordinary: like the turkey whose experience all goes to show how human beings love him and care about him and prove it by feeding him--until Thanksgiving day arrives and he's dinner.

Massage therapist,” for example, is a “nonscalable” profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see—there’s only so much time in a day, and therapists’ bodies fatigue—and thus there’s only so much income you can expect from that profession. Chapter four brings together the topics discussed earlier into a narrative about a turkey before Thanksgiving who is fed and treated well for many consecutive days, only to be slaughtered and served as a meal. Taleb uses it to illustrate the philosophical problem of induction and how past performance is no indicator of future performance. [14] He then takes the reader into the history of skepticism.

While the author has valid points, his writing style oscillates between boring, repetitive, and just plain bad. Plus he uses the pronouns “I” and “me” more often than any other author I have read. Perhaps he is using his gigantic ego to prove the existence of fat tails in the standard bell curve and thus exhibit directly the central thesis which is that the Gaussian curve does not hold up in our modern “extremistan” society (and trust me that that sentence is funny if you read the book). In 1997, Babitz was severely injured when ash from a cigar she was smoking ignited her skirt, causing life-threatening third-degree burns over half her body. Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. Babitz’s talent for the brilliant line, honed to a point, never interferes with her feel for languid pleasures." ― The New York Times Book Review

Biologically, Taleb says, human beings are not set up to be deep thinkers and are fooled by a variety of logical fallacies. This is only a problem because, as time goes on, humanity has less running away to do from things trying to eat us and more dealing with the complexities of modern existence. But who is Eve Babitz? Born in Hollywood, in 1943, Babitz is an American author and artist. Los Angeles plays a main role in her fictive memoirs, but so do the men, the artists, and the drugs. And, if we’re talking men, we should just mention that Jim Morrison was one of her many lovers. Everyone thinks they know what is going on in this world that is much more complicated than they realise. When something unexpected happens, they retrospectively distort all previous thoughts. They can only assess matters after the fact, as if they were in the rearview mirror. History books are much more organised than empirical reality. Our minds are wonderful explaining machines, capable of making sense of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena. We are also generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. An anti-academic academic weaves a non-narrative narrative about predicting the unpredictable into the theory that rigid theories are bad. Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.Once upon a time there was a clever young financial professional called Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Of Lebanese - or, as he preferred, Levantine - descent but working in New York, he was an option trader and quantative analyst. Mistrusting the "bell-curve" models used by many financial institutions to mitigate risk, he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness about the delusions of control and reliability under which labour much of Wall Street, many other businesses - and, indeed, individual human beings. There is a contradiction; this book is a story, and I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.... You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. [6] Part one: Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation [ edit ] My only other complaint--and it's not one I can really spell out with any confidence--is this: I came away with this diffuse sense of overconfidence from Taleb...that he believes his metaphors and conjectures, etc. apply in more instances than they actually do.