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

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent.

Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history,

we don’t learn that we don’t learn.

(I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment).

everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.

Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have.

We lack imagination and repress it in others.

successions of anecdotes selected to fit a story do not constitute evidence.

Anyone looking for confirmation will find enough of it to deceive himself—and no doubt his peers.*

This is not an autobiography, so I will skip the scenes of war. Actually, even if it were an autobiography, I would still skip the scenes of war.

True, with hindsight, the place may appear more Elysian in the memory of people than it actually was.

My paternal uncle was not too bothered by my political ideas (these come and go); he was outraged that I used them as an excuse to dress sloppily.

These events were unexplainable, but intelligent people thought they were capable of providing convincing explanations for them—after the fact.