On Black Swans"Our human race is affected with a chronic underestimation of the possibility of the future straying from the course initially envisioned.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that's what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise. Nevertheless, people tend to concoct explanations for them after the fact, which makes them appear more predictable, and less random, than they are." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
"Much of the research into humans' risk-avoidance machinery shows that it is antiquated and unfit for the modern world; it is made to counter repeatable attacks and learn from specifics. If someone narrowly escapes being eaten by a tiger in a certain cave, then he learns to avoid that cave. Yet vicious black swans by definition do not repeat themselves. We cannot learn from them easily." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
On Skeptical Empiricism
"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a larger personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have your read?' And the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an anti-library. We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of the competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes form our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously. Let us call an anti-scholar – someone who focuses on the unread books and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device – a skeptical empiricist." - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan
Life Tips, The Sunday Times, 6/1/2008
- Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
- Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
- It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
- Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
- Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
- Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
- Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
- Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
- Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
- Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, A Crazier Future
From Comedy Central
The Colbert Report with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Video)
From edge.org
Reflections on a Crisis: A Conversation in Munich with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Daniel Kahneman (Video)
From RSA Events
David Cameron in Conversation with Nassim Taleb (Video)
From The Sunday Times
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Prophet of Boom and Doom by Bryan Appleyard
From The New Yorker
BLOWING UP: How Nassim Taleb Turned the Inevitability of Disaster into an Investment Strategy, by Malcolm Gladwell (PDF)
From The Financial Times
Ten Principles for a Black Swan-Proof World by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)
From the Foreword of Lecturing Birds How to Fly
History Written by the Losers by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)
From NPR
'Black Swans' and the Problems of Probability by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Audio, Transcript, Book Excerpt)
From edge.org
The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
From Change This Manifestos
Few and Far Between: Black Swans and the Impossibility of Prediction by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (PDF)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's WEBSITE
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