three lessons from the black swanthe impact of the highly improbable

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bookguide on 24/06/10 city: New-York tags: greatbooks book summary Comment: 0 Save: 0

Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote this book about randomness and uncertainty, which Taleb says are a single idea. The basic idea in the Black Swan is not to attempt to predict Black Swan (out of the blue) events, but to put strength into negative events that happen and being able to exploit positive events. The book title is inspired by the story about the discovery of the Australian back swan, when everyone in the world assumed all swans were white.

Lesson Number No. 1: Beware of the "black swan"
There isn't much time for your assumptions to be broken silly by a new arrival on the scene or by a party you did not even now existed.

Lesson No. 2: Beware of the unknown unknown
Taleb says that what we don't know is possibly more important than what we do know (or think we know).

Lesson No. 3: Beware of fire hydrants
For example, we will often treat news in a peculiar manner. Rather than accept the new information at face value, we instead choose to select portions of the news to support what we think we already know.

In other words, Bias and a closed mind are not good things.

[From the great books series. Also read The Success Manual - Encyclopedia of advice

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Three Lessons from The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable