The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
byNassim Nicholas Taleb
I should preface this book remark, by saying that some people may dislike Taleb's style of writing and personality and become dissuaded from finishing the book. Others may be able to look beyond that and focus on the ideas. The idea behind The Black Swan is very important and one core message is that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknowable, the unpredictable. Taleb promotes the idea of empirical skepticism, and how social scientists have failed to predict outcomes which have huge systematic failures once faced by these black swan events.
Motivations to Read
I wanted to understand more about the philosophy and economics behind probability. Being self-aware of my future-oriented mindset from a young age, I knew that I needed to a have better fundamental understanding of probability to improve my decision-making skills. But before I jumped into the hard math behind it, I was curious to understand the narrative and the thought process of how very low probability events have had a significant impact on society and what one can go to prepare for the improbable.
3 Reasons to Read
- Learn more about the nature of uncertainty
- Become more aware of the psychological blocks that we are both born with and have created for ourselves that prevent our understanding of the improbable: The Narrative Fallacy and The Problem of Induction (The tricky relationship of cause and effect)
- How to plan for the improbable and The economic impact the improbable can have
