The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2) Kindle Edition

The polemicist Simon Foucher warned that, “we are dogma-prone from our mother’s wombs.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s philosophical work, The Black Swan, is truly a masterpiece that addresses this problem. At one point in the book, Taleb asserts that “the ultimate test of whether you like an author is if you’ve reread him”. Considering the fact that I’ve now read this book twice, it’s fair to say that I greatly admire Taleb’s work. Now on to the review.***In “Part 1″, there is an interesting anecdote, that sets the tone for the rest of the book, about Umberto Eco’s library. Eco is a highly respected semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. And he owns a library that reportedly contains over 30,000 books. He isn’t, however, known for being boastful about it. When guests come over to his house he usually gets one of two reactions. The vast majority of guests, according to Taleb, respond with something similar to the following “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” And then there are the people who get the point: “A large personal library is not an ego-boosting appendage, but a research tool.” The point of this story emphasizes a critical theme throughout the book, i.e., we overemphasize what we think we know and downplay how ignorant we really are. An antilibrary (representing things we don’t know) is more valuable to us than are the books we’ve already read (or things we already know).Early on we also learn that Taleb classifies himself as a skeptical empiricist. And, you may be wondering, what exactly is a skeptical empiricist? “Let us call an antischolar — 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.”For further clarification, empiricism is a theory of knowledge, which asserts that knowledge can only be ascertained exclusively via sensory experience. And skepticism, it’s important to note, comes in many different varieties. Taleb traces his skepticism back to its roots in the Pyrrhonian tradition. However, he is also fond of “Sextus the (Alas) Empirical” (better known as Sextus Empiricus) and David Hume. Taleb, however, is not entirely devoted to promoting rampant philosophical skepticism. He simply wants to be “a practitioner whose principal aim is to not be a sucker in things that matter, period.”Largely, then, this book is about epistemology, also known as the study of human knowledge. What can we truly know? And what are the limits of human knowledge? I think Taleb focuses one of the fundamental problems of philosophy, which the German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, also wrote extensively about (although from a different perspective), i.e., what are the limits of our reason? Kant realized that examining human reason is inherently problematic, namely because when humans try to examine metaphysical or even epistemological issues we can never do so outside the bounds of our own reasoning ability. We’re suckers, blinded to reality, because we are trapped in our own human minds!Throughout the book, Taleb picks on the great thinker of antiquity, Plato. Taleb, however, also gives the impression that he is quite fond of the great philosopher too, despite his shortcomings. What Taleb calls Platonicity is the obsessive focus on the pure and well-defined aspects of reality, while ignoring the messier parts and less tractable structure that exist in reality. Perhaps an example of Platonicity might help clear up this distinction. A Platonified economist, for example, thinks that he can accurately model something as complex as the macroeconomy. Using foolish assumptions, the Platonified economist tries to assume conditions of reality (that don’t really exist) in order to fit her model rather than accepting that reality is far messier than the model. One who is a Platonic thinker, then, could also be classified as a nerd. Nerds, according to Taleb, believe that what cannot be Platonized and formally studied doesn’t exist, or isn’t worth considering.One interesting example of Platonicity provided in the book pertains to breast milk. At one point in time, Platonified scientists believed that they had created a formula for a mother’s “milk” that was perfectly identical to a mother’s real milk. Alas, they could then manufacture this milk in a laboratory and make financial gains from it! Despite what appeared to be an identical chemical composition, there was empirical evidence showing increases in various cancers and other health problems in children who drank this fake-milk. Was this a coincidence? Perhaps. But it also could be that the Platonified scientific formula for milk was missing some crucial element of the milk that we cannot see!Platoncitity can further be generalized as follows, “it is our tendency to mistake the map for the territory, to focus on well and pure defined “forms,” whether objects, like triangles, or social notions, like utopias (societies built according to some blueprint of what “makes sense”), even nationalities. “ In other words, a Platonified nerd is someone who visits New York City, but has with a map of San Francisco with them, and yet still thinks that their incorrect map will somehow help them. Taleb believes that we have a built-in tendency to trust our maps, even when they’re for the wrong location. Furthermore, we fail to realize that no map is often better than the wrong map.The trouble is, according to Taleb, that we encourage nerd knowledge over other forms of knowledge, especially in academia. Nerds focus on what fits in the box, even if the most important things in life fall outside the box. The nerd simply neglects the antilibrary.At one point in history it was considered “knowledge” that all swans are white. This was stated as a scientific fact because no black swans had ever been observed. However, this line of reasoning presents an interesting philosophical problem, i.e., “The Problem of Induction“. And the great philosopher, David Hume, wrote in great detail about this problem, although he wasn’t the first to do so.In order to further understand this problem let’s consider the following classic inference that led to the problem: All swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white. The problem is that even the observation of a billion white swans does not make that statement unequivocally true. This is because black swans may exist, we just haven’t observed one yet. We have obviously since discovered that black swans do indeed exist. What can we learn here? An over reliance on our observations can lead us astray.Still confused? Then, let’s consider what we can we learn from a turkey, which hopefully provides further clarification. The uberphilsopher Bertrand Russell illustrated this turkey example quite well.Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving it will incur a revision of belief.Taleb, then, states, “The turkey problem can be generalized to any situation where the same hand that feeds you can be the one that wrings your neck.” Probably the most important point to note from the turkey is that our perceived knowledge from learning backwards may not just be worthless, but rather, it may actually be creating negative value by blinding us to future events with dire consequences.As such, it’s certainly important to note that a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence. But where does that leave us in terms of how we can know things? Well, Taleb further argues that we can know things that are wrong, but not necessarily correct (think Karl Popper’s falsifiability). This he calls negative empiricism. The sight of one black swan, then, can certify that not all swans are white, but the observation of a trillion white swans doesn’t give us any certifiable claims.Strangely, however, we humans have a tendency to ignore the possibility of silent evidence and look to confirm our theories, rather than challenge them.One of the central tenets of the book is the distinction between “Mediocristan” and “Extremistan”, which are terms for different types of domains.. When you’re dealing with a domain that’s in Mediocristan, then your data will fit a Gaussian distribution (a bell curve). In Extremistan, however, you’re not dealing with data that is normally distributed. A single observation in Extremistan can have an incredible impact on the total. Think of the following example. If we took the average height of a million humans and then, say, added the tallest person in the world to the sample, the average wouldn’t be affected in a significant way. Height is normally distributed. Now imagine we did the same thing with wealth. Adding the richest person in the world to a sample of a million people would greatly affect the average. The distribution of height, then, falls within the domain of Mediocristan and things like wealth in Extremistan.One of Taleb’s main points is that we often try to use the model that works in Mediocristan in Extremistan. Taleb states, however, that almost all social matters belong to Extremistan and that the casino is the only human venture where probabilities are known and almost computable. But even casinos aren’t immune to Extremistan — think about it.Another interesting concept from the book is the “toxicity of knowledge.” Too much information can be toxic especially when it inflates the confidence in an “expert” prediction. More information is not always better; more is sometimes better, but not always. And we often blindly listen to experts in fields where there can be no experts.If you follow Taleb’s argument, then reading the newspaper may actually decrease, rather than increase, your knowledge of the world. The Black Swan, however, will not only increase your understanding of the world, but it will make you wiser as well. For that reason, I can assure you that I will be rereading this book yet again at some point in the future.

"All swans are white" was an unassailable truth up until the discovery of Australia — it was something everyone knew to be a fact. But it was neither true nor a fact. All it took was the sighting of one black swan in the new southern continent to turn the Old World upside down on its head. Taleb, a cagey Lebanese-born philosopher and thinker, has grabbed onto the "black swan" as a synecdoche for an abruptly appearing, totally unexpected event which has a great impact on the world, but for which the world conjures up ex post facto explanations which makes it all sound reasonable and predictable. Sure, antiseptic procedures for doctors sound reasonable today, but the black swan Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was imprisoned in a mental institution by the head of his hospital, even after his procedures had saved over a hundred-thousand women in Vienna from dying in childbirth! I have made a vocation of seeking out such black swan innovators, both those like Semmelweis whose contributions grace history books and some whom I have been fortunate to meet and or converse with, such as Immanuel Velikovsky, Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Joseph Newman, Andrew Joseph Galambos, Doyle Philip Henderson, and Kaisu Viikari. Those that I have met only through books constitute a longer list, and I will mention their names in case you wish to look up their contributions as outliers in their unique fields of innovation and discovery: Alfred Korzybski, Rudolf Steiner, Gregor Mendel, Owen Barfield, Anastasia, Barbara McClintock, Carlos Castaneda, Jane Roberts, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Watzlawick, Gregory Bateson, Richard Feynman, Robert Axelrod, and Thomas Paine, among others. It is only fitting that I add the author of this book, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, to the list of black swans I have met through books because his coined phrase black swan will echo down the halls of time, much as Tom Kuhn's word paradigm which he rescued from obscurity and pumped new life into in 1962.In New Orleans in the Fall of 2005, my wife and I lived through the Black Swan known as Katrina. It appeared overnight and left in its wake a devastated metropolitan area. How did we react to Katrina? We restored our home on the West Bank and our fourplex apartments in New Orleans. I had ridden out Hurricane Betsy about 40 years before Katrina and seen the devastation left behind then, and I had heard of the Great Flood of 1927, about 40 years before Betsy. Knowing something about batting averages, it seems to me that the City of New Orleans needs a catastrophe about every 40 years. The first generation after the catastrophe remembers it and expects another catastrophe like it every year. The second generation only hears about it and never expects one, but the new third generation forty years later gets shook up by a new and unexpected catastrophe and the cycle starts over. I doubt that Taleb would accept my simple baseball metaphor of batting average for predicting a city's experience with catastrophes, but I offer it in the absence of any other explanation. It can bring a certain measure of comfort to those who might otherwise spend Spring through Fall of every year worrying about another Katrina.Here's how Taleb describes the dynamics of Black Swans and what might qualify as a Black Swan:[page viii] Just imagine how little your understanding of the world on the eve of the events of 1914 would have helped you guess what was to happen next. (Don't cheat by using the explanations drilled into your cranium by your dull high school teacher.) How about the rise of Hitler and the subsequent war? How about the precipitous demise of the Soviet bloc? How about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism? How about the spread of the Internet? How about the market crash of 1987 (and the more unexpected recovery)? Fads, epidemics, fashion, ideas, the emergence of art genres and schools. All follow these Black Swan dynamics. Literally, just about everything of significance around you might qualify.This combination of low predictability and large impact makes the Black Swan a great puzzle; but that is not yet the core concern of this book. Add to this phenomenon the fact that we tend to act as if it does not exist! I don't mean just you, your cousin Joey, and me, but almost all "social scientists" who, for over a century, have operated under the false belief that their tools could measure uncertainty.Taleb's forté is the world of finance and economics, and his advice is that no advice from anyone can predict Black Swans. He even gives you a way of discovering this truth he offers, an operation that many of you can easily perform to ascertain how oblivious the best informed experts in the world are to Black Swans.[page xviii] . . . the applications of the sciences of uncertainty to real-world problems has had ridiculous effects; I have been privileged to see it in finance and economics. Go ask your portfolio manager for his definition of "risk," and odds are that he will supply you with a measure that excludes the possibility of the Black Swan — hence one that has no better predictive value for assessing the total risks than astrology (we will see how they dress up the intellectual fraud with mathematics). This problem is endemic in social matters.Do you begin to feel as if a rug has been pulled out from under you, causing you to lose your level of comfort in the world? If not, you have not yet understood the problem, and you may gently pull yourself away from this review, dear Reader, and return to your favorite illusory world where Black Swans don't exist, where the world is uniform, slowly changing, and where manufacturing gasoline pumps will always be a prosperous business to invest in. You and I live in a world where no Black Swan will suddenly pop up to make oil a useless black goo best left underground.Taleb begins the meat of the book talking about Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, which he defines as the unread books on the shelves of Eco's 30,000 volume library, the research volumes. Like my visitors, people would come into Eco's home and notice the size of his library and ask him how many of the books he's read, as if that were the sole reason for owning a library, to read every book. That concept of antilibrary goes to the heart of Taleb's profession as he deems himself to be a skeptical empiricist.[page 2] Let us call an antischolar — 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.Before we actually reach the first page of Chapter One, we know all about Taleb in a thumbnail sketchy way so that we are well-prepared for the main course which will flesh out the menu explanations he has shared with us during his impressive Prologue. I don't know about you, but I wanted to order and digest every meal on his menu and was well-satisfied with my dining experience with him as I closed the book.I cannot tell all the many things I learned in this book, nor do I intend to try. We live in a world full of people who believe that eventually computers will figure out everything and predict everything which is going to happen. These are people who have not read or digested the material of this book, which is indeed an eponymous Black Swan among books and as such will likely be unread and misunderstood when read. Gregory Bateson, a Black Swan among thinkers and an eminent cyberneticist, was asked once by a student, "Professor Bateson, how will we know when computers have reached the level of human intelligence?" Bateson thought for a minute and answered, "We will ask the computer a question, and it will answer, 'That reminds me of a story.'" As Taleb writes on page xxvi of his Prologue, "Ideas come and go. Stories stay." Computers will never answer any questions with stories, and thus will never provide anything lasting, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb has provided a monument to his skeptical empiricism which will stand for all time to come. He explains to us what it means to be human in an inhuman world and how to survive given the reality of Black Swans. To learn more you can read Bobby Matherne's DIGESTWORLD Issue#11c.

an interesting concept and worth reading as thought provoking. However, I think the writing could have been more concise and less ponderous. The same message and information delivered in fewer pages. Some passages are a bit laborious.

Brilliant

A great read for mathematically inclined bourgeoisie, but for us peasants it can be a little dense and convoluted. Presenting big ideas in a logical fashion that seem to carry weight in the day to day life of the "everyman", this book offers more of a perspective enhancement than it does a practical means to acheive to the improbable yet high-yielding outcomes it spends a great deal of time exploring. Nonetheless, Taleb exudes personality on every page - like a punk-rock statistician of sorts - and the book is surprisingly easy to read even during the numerous instances where the "get to the point" vibe sets in.

I enjoyed the book, and it has a lot of very good interesting ideas, but I found it a challenging read. Quite pithy, but some concepts take effort and time to unpack, not being quite genius level. There are several realizations to take away, and I have used examples from the book in discussions and explanations with friends and co-workers. The book challenges many common assumptions, esp. about likelihood and risk. In short: many good ideas, and worth the effort. Amazing number of cross references to other books.

Wer meint, die Welt sei berechenbar und die Materialisation der Gausschen-Glockenkurve sei das Mass der Dinge könnte sich irren. Taleb ist ohne Zweifel einer der wenigen "Genial-Bekloppten" des Planeten und ein "Nerd" der Premiumklasse. Die Aufbereitung des Themas "Wahrscheinlichkeit" ist ohne Beispiel und sollte jeden berühren, der sich von rein akademischer Stochastik verschaukelt fühlt. In Zeiten, wo Klimabesorgte mathematische Gewissheit in Gauss-Funktionen suchen eine echte Alternative in Perspektive. Ein sogenanntes "le must"😉 Ein Punkt Abzug für seine biographischen selbszentrierten Knallerbsen.