The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nichola Taleb
In a world where people assume all swans are white, the discovery of a black swan can be devastating to one’s preconceptions about what it means to be a swan in the first place. In this book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the discovery of a black swan to illustrate the unpredictability of life: “It [the Black Swan] illustrates a severe limitation to our learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge. One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans” (vxii). Black Swans are rare events that have extreme impact, that is, they are “highly improbable consequential events” (18). Taleb believes that a “small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives” (xviii). Simply consider the unpredicted yet incalculable impact of both World Wars, the demise of the Soviet bloc, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, the spread of the internet, and 9/11. The Black Swan exposes our relative uncertainty about all things (xxiv). For my extended summary and reflection on this book, click HERE.