"What can a turkey learn about what is in store for it tomorrow from the events of yesterday?" Taleb asks. "A lot, perhaps but certainly a little less than it thinks, and it is just that 'little less' that may make all the difference."
Thus is the essence of the Black Swan, the dangers of the highly improbable and how a dependence on patterns of the past leave one susceptible to danger.
Taleb rails against the notion that bell curves satisfy the sampling of all facts and that modeling the past, even if it were possible to do perfectly, cannot possibly predict unexpected events. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, bank crisis; these things tend to not show up on normal prediction models finding themselves typically lumped into either being too unlikely or just impossible to predict - yet they all have major impacts when they do happen. Taleb thus asserts that if our prediction models cannot or do not account for the highly improbable yet these events typically have significant impacts, what use are the models?
His answer for this is robustness and redundancy. Riding out the storm (surviving) is just as important to long term success as growth, but predominantly overlooked. Listen to Taleb's comment regarding how misunderstood his message had been during the financial meltdown of 2008. "Matthew Barett, former Chairman of Barclays Bank and Bank of Montreal complained, after all the events of 2008 and 2009, that the Black Swan did not tell him 'what I should do about that' and he 'can't run a business' worrying about Black Swan risks. The person has never heard of the notion of fragility and robustness to extreme deviations - which illustrates my idea." Had this banker run his organization with a little more thought on how they might have endured unexpected news things could have been different. Yet as evidenced by the similar line of thinking among most financial institutions at the time, its all too common to go on operating and planning as if the patterns of the past can be counted on to predict the future with little regard to how they would handle matters if that wasn't true.
Taleb is heavily biased by his history as a trader and takes aim chiefly at economics. But the idea of the Black Swan (that no amount of white swans can prove black swans do not exist) is evident everywhere. Nearly any area that entails assumptions about the future is affected by the notion of the black swan. His writing is choppy, often staggering from one point to another, and as much of this book is anecdotal as it is scientific. Yet having seen him speak I came to the realization that this has more to do with his lack of command of the English language (he is Lebanese whose first language is French) and his greater interest in philosophizing than in debating. Neither detracts from the validly of his message and anyone who enjoys giving thought to the meaning of the events that shape our lives will find insight and value from this book.
Taleb is heavily biased by his history as a trader and takes aim chiefly at economics. But the idea of the Black Swan (that no amount of white swans can prove black swans do not exist) is evident everywhere. Nearly any area that entails assumptions about the future is affected by the notion of the black swan. His writing is choppy, often staggering from one point to another, and as much of this book is anecdotal as it is scientific. Yet having seen him speak I came to the realization that this has more to do with his lack of command of the English language (he is Lebanese whose first language is French) and his greater interest in philosophizing than in debating. Neither detracts from the validly of his message and anyone who enjoys giving thought to the meaning of the events that shape our lives will find insight and value from this book.
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