More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
(Independence is person-specific: I have always been taken aback at the high number of people in whom an astonishingly high income led to additional sycophancy as they became more dependent on their clients and employers and more addicted to making even more money.)
I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea.
Limousine Philosopher
The answer was looking straight at me: it was a psychological, perhaps even biological, blindness; the problem lay not in the nature of events, but in the way we perceived them.
The historian Niall Ferguson showed that, despite all the standard accounts of the buildup to the Great War, which describe “mounting tensions” and “escalating crises,” the conflict came as a surprise. Only retrospectively was it seen as unavoidable by backward-looking historians.
But bond prices did not reflect the anticipation of war. Note that this study illustrates, in addition, how working with prices can provide a good understanding of history.
Chapter Two YEVGENIA’S BLACK SWAN
She had attended a famous writing workshop five years earlier and came out nauseated. “Writing well” seemed to mean obeying arbitrary rules that had grown into gospel, with the confirmatory reinforcement of what we call “experience.”
that most of what is new, by definition, cannot be modeled on past issues of The New Yorker.
Publishers now have a theory that “truck drivers who read books do not read books written for truck drivers” and hold that “readers despise writers who pander to them.” A scientific paper, it is now understood, can hide trivialities or irrelevance with equations and jargon; consilient prose, by exposing an idea in raw form, allows it to be judged by the public.
The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is considered too archaic to withstand the challenges of modern society. It was so evident that we needed to remedy the fragmentation between art and science.
Yevgenia’s book is a Black Swan.
Chapter Three THE SPECULATOR AND THE PROSTITUTE
Yevgenia’s rise from the second basement to superstar is possible in only one environment, which I call Extremistan.*
THE BEST (WORST) ADVICE
When I play back in my mind all the “advice” people have given me, I see that only a couple of ideas have stuck with me for life. The rest has been mere words, and I am glad that I did not heed most of it.
The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice.
A second-year Wharton student told me to get a profession that is “scalable,” that is, one in which you are not paid by the hour and thus subject to the limitations of the amount of your labor.
and it led me to the major philosophical problem, the problem of induction, which is the technical name for the Black Swan.
uncertainty? Some professions, such as dentists, consultants, or massage professionals, cannot be scaled: there is a cap on the number of patients or clients you can see in a given period of time.
Furthermore, your presence is (I assume) necessary for the service you provide.
Your revenue depends on your continuous efforts more than on the quality of your decisions.
I immediately (but mistakenly) drew a conclusion. I separated the “idea” person, who sells an intellectual product in the form of a transaction or a piece of work, from the “labor” person, who sells you his work.
Similarly, a writer expends the same effort to attract one single reader as she would to capture several hundred million.
BEWARE THE SCALABLE
But why was the advice from my fellow student bad?
It might have paid off for me, but only because I was lucky and happened to be “in the right place at the right time,”
A scalable profession is good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random, with huge disparities between efforts and rewards—a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.
One category of profession is driven by the mediocre, the average, and the middle-of-the-road. In it, the mediocre is collectively consequential. The other has either giants or dwarves—more precisely, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarves.
The Advent of Scalability
Inequalities exist, but let us call them mild.
Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that introduced a great deal of injustice.
Evolution is scalable: the DNA that wins (whether by luck or survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a bestselling book or a successful record, and become pervasive.
Furthermore, I believe that the big transition in social life came not with the gramophone, but when someone had the great but unjust idea to invent the alphabet, thus allowing us to store information and reproduce it. It accelerated further when another inventor had the even more dangerous and iniquitous notion of starting a printing press, thus promoting
texts across boundaries and triggering what ultimately grew into a winner-take-all ecology.
author. This implies that those who, for some reason, start getting some attention can quickly reach more minds than others and displace the competitors from the bookshelves. In the days of bards and troubadours, everyone had an audience. A storyteller, like a baker or a coppersmith, had a market, and the assurance that none from far away could dislodge him from his territory. Today, a few take almost everything; the rest, next to nothing.
In the arts—say the cinema—things are far more vicious. What we call “talent”
generally comes from success, rather than its opposite.
He showed that, sadly, much of what we ascribe to skills is an after-the-fact attribution. The movie makes the actor, he claims—and a large dose of nonlinear luck makes the movie.
The success of movies depends severely on contagions. Such contagions do not just apply to the movies: they seem to affect a wide range of cultural products.
SCALABILITY AND GLOBALIZATION
There is more money in designing a shoe than in actually making it:
TRAVELS INSIDE MEDIOCRISTAN
In the utopian province of Mediocristan, particular events don’t contribute much individually—only collectively. I can state the supreme law of Mediocristan as follows: When your sample is large, no single instance will significantly change the aggregate or the total. The largest observation will remain impressive, but eventually insignificant, to the sum.
The Strange Country of Extremistan
In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.
does, since a few occurrences have had huge influences on history. This is the main idea of this book.
Extremistan and Knowledge
The idea is not more difficult than that. In Extremistan, one unit can easily affect the total in a disproportionate way. In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.
Matters that seem to belong to Extremistan (subjected to what we call type 2 randomness): wealth, income, book sales per author, book citations per author, name recognition as a “celebrity,” number of references on Google, populations of cities, uses of words in a vocabulary,
