The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Experts who tend to be experts: livestock judges, astronomers, test pilots, soil judges, chess masters, physicists, mathematicians (when they deal with mathematical problems, not empirical ones), accountants, grain inspectors, photo interpreters, insurance analysts (dealing with bell curve–style statistics). Experts who tend to be … not experts: stockbrokers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, college admissions officers, court judges, councilors, personnel selectors, intelligence analysts (the CIA’s record, in spite of its costs, is pitiful), unless one takes into account some great dose of invisible prevention. I would add these results from my own examination of the literature: economists, financial forecasters, finance professors, political scientists, “risk experts,” Bank for International Settlements staff, august members of the International Association of Financial Engineers, and personal financial advisers. Simply, things that move, and therefore require knowledge, do not usually have experts, while things that don’t move seem to have some experts. In other words, professions that deal with the future and base their studies on the nonrepeatable past have an expert problem (with the exception of the weather and businesses involving short-term physical processes, not socioeconomic ones).