An Analysis of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by Eric Royal Lybeck

One of the primary qualities of good creative thinking is an intellectual freedom to think outside of the box. Good creative thinkers resist orthodox ideas, take new lines of enquiry, and generally come at problems from the kinds of angles almost no one else could. And, what is more, when the ideas of creative thinkers are convincing, they can reshape an entire topic, and change the orthodoxy for good. Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s 2007 bestseller The Black The Impact of the Highly Improbable is precisely such a an entertaining, polemical, creative attack on how people in general, and economic experts in particular view the possibility of catastrophic events. Taleb writes with rare creative verve for someone who is also an expert in mathematics, finance, and epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), and he martials all his skills to turn standard reasoning inside out. His central point is that far from being unimportant, extremely rare events are frequently the most important ones of it is highly improbable, but highly consequential occurrences – what he calls Black Swans – that have shaped history most. As a result, Taleb concludes, improbability is not a reason to act as if a possible event does not matter. Rather, it should inspire the opposite reaction.

96 pages, Hardcover

Published July 15, 2017

Reviews

[Pranusha Kulkarni · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the Macat booklets for simplifying the books they review. This particular booklet on The Black Swan is good for those who don’t have time or interest to read the original book. It evinced my interest enough to persuade me to read the original. After reading this analysis, I realised how closed and tribal academia is, and am impressed by Taleb’s career trajectory and his frank analysis of the regressiveness of economics as a field. Gives me hope that the end result of PhD needn’t be academics, and still one can be a public intellectual, though by doing this, one may lose the benefits of the membership of the elitist “academic club” ☺️