Black Swans: Stories

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Interesting how the author growing up in Lebanon, tipping from a peaceful equilibrium into civil war, tells his story of the world disregarding improbable events through oversimplification and overreliance on the bell curve Taleb lauds two unexpected types of practitioners: military people and financial managers. They will know if their predictions are wrong or right. If they are wrong, they'll have to face the music. Their predictions matter. Not so the world of talking heads and stuffed shirts: they just adjust their stories and keep on going. The world is not fair. Unfairness and inequality are no epiphenomena but part and parcel of reality. these felt a little more outdated than eve usually does (how is she so magically relevant regardless of timing!), but they still had as much of her humor and wit and charm. My only other complaint--and it's not one I can really spell out with any confidence--is this: I came away with this diffuse sense of overconfidence from Taleb...that he believes his metaphors and conjectures, etc. apply in more instances than they actually do.

If you see an ice cube sitting on a table you can predict the future: it will melt into a little puddle of water. But if you see a puddle on the table, and that's all you see, there could be a thousand stories of what it is and how it came to be there. The correct explanation may be 1001--or one which will never be found. Salmon, Felix (August 23, 2009). "The Flaw of Averages". Reuters blogs. Archived from the original on August 27, 2009 . Retrieved December 20, 2020. Right at the end it occurred to me that this is religion. He tells you how to sustain yourself in the absence of worldly support, how to stand up to others and say your piece, how to wait and be patient, and about the merits of surrounding yourself with like-minded souls.

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It is an inconvenient truth that humans’ predictive capabilities are extremely limited; we are continuously faced with catastrophic or revolutionary events that arrive completely unexpectedly and for which we have no plan. Yet, nevertheless, we maintain that the future is knowable and that we can adequately prepare for it. Taleb calls this tendency the scandal of prediction. Epistemic Arrogance Many of the major turning points in your personal life (e.g. how you met your spouse, your biggest gains and losses) were also likely to have been unexpected, i.e. they didn’t come from standard events on your daily schedule. There is a contradiction; this book is a story, and I prefer to use stories and vignettes to illustrate our gullibility about stories and our preference for the dangerous compression of narratives.... You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. [6] Part one: Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation [ edit ]

Although the world is ran by unpredictable events, it doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from them. Taleb closes with a bunch of practical tips to benefit from the uncertainty in the world. The Eve Babitz phenomenon continues with this special reissue of her 1993 story collection in a beautiful new edition So I gave this book two stars. I valued the content but it is most definitely not groundbreaking and it most definitely is not well written.In Mediocristan environments, there’s a limit to the amount of randomness or deviation from the average. Inequalities exist, but they’re mild or controlled. Usually, there’re some physical constraints (e.g. height, weight, running speed) which limit the amount of variability. For example, if you add the tallest or heaviest man in history to a sample size of 1,000 people, the outlier won’t make a real difference to the average. There’s also typically a linear relationship between variables. Prediction is possible in such environments or systems. Despite (or perhaps because of) their extreme unpredictability, they compel human beings to account for them—to explain after the fact that they were in fact predictable.