Black Swan

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity

by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.  · 24 Sep 2019  · 242pp  · 71,943 words

may be at a fatal disadvantage in another. It’s those who can survive in both that have the opportunity to flourish. Author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb, in a 2013 speech at Loyola College titled “How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand,” explained how humans have reacted to

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habitat). Wall Street trader turned author and philosopher Nassim Taleb suggests that there are confident ways to live in a world you don’t fully understand. They begin with acknowledging the limits of our capacity to predict the future. From his book The Black Swan: If you know all possible conditions of a

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City (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 6 https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/the-changing-geography-of-us- poverty/. 7 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007). 8 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile (New York: Random House, 2012). 9 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05friedman.html. 7 Productive Places

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for, 136–137 Big project mentality, 184–186 The Big Sort (Bishop), 207–208 “Bipartisan Placemaking: Reaching Conservatives” panel, 210 Bishop, Bill, 207–208 The Black Swan (Taleb), 59, 120 Blighted areas, productivity of, 131–134, 140 Boise State University, 126 Boys & Girls Club of Santa Ana, x Brainerd, Minnesota, 16f, 18f development

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

by Scott Patterson  · 5 Jun 2023  · 289pp  · 95,046 words

1998 collapse of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management after it made wildly misguided bets on Russian debt (among other things). Taleb had begun calling such crises Black Swans—extreme events no one could have predicted (like a sudden market crash). Once upon a time Europeans thought all swans were white

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anyone else.” Spitznagel would concede the last point. * * * While Nassim Taleb had popularized the Black Swan concept, Universa was entirely Spitznagel’s baby. After winding down Empirica, Taleb had become something of a celebrity thinker and philosophical gadfly as he extended his Black Swan concept far beyond trading and finance. His heart’s desire was

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few understand. We increasingly live in an exponential world—but our brains are hardwired for the linear. The study of the exponential was Taleb’s bread and butter—the mathematical keystone of his Black Swan worldview. Pandemics, of course, aren’t new. They’re as old as civilization. But new viruses can have

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of the United States. Other countries, including Great Britain, were also taking the wait-and-see approach. Taleb would later say the wait-and-see camp have it backward when it comes to Black Swans and global systemic risk—and pandemics. “Absence of knowledge should give you more certainty regarding what to

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chillingly perverse result of their increasing frequency is that such events are becoming more predictable in certain ways. They are not Black Swans that sweep in out of the blue. They are Taleb’s Gray Swans—devastating events that are all-too-foreseeable. The coast-smashing hurricanes that occur with numbing regularity. The

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cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of ‘Black Swans,’ unforeseen and unforeseeable events of extreme consequence,” Taleb and his coauthors wrote in the 2014 paper. If the risk of an action (or inaction) is global, uncertainty demands a

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in his thirties. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the model. He was an outlier. He was a… Black Swan? * * * In 1996, Taleb met Victor Niederhoffer, one of the most successful hedge fund managers in America, who spent his spare time playing tennis with George Soros. He’d

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around you, where it’s going, why. Falsification showed that, in fact, you might not—and Black Swans might be lurking around the corner to prove how wrong you are. To illustrate the idea, Taleb liked to use the example of a turkey on Thanksgiving. He called it the Turkey Problem. Every

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Spitznagel had wildly contrasting approaches to trading. Spitznagel operated purely by the book, following the precise system they’d painstakingly formulated and tested—the Black Swan protocol. Taleb was more shoot from the hip, trading at times by gut feeling rather than a set formula, in the hopes of front-running a

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between fat tails and fractal geometry and all the fascinating math behind it. Here was a whole new way to think about randomness and Black Swans, he realized. Taleb in short order became a close collaborator with Mandelbrot, who lived just a few miles away from his home in Larchmont. In 2006,

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and John von Neumann, to name a few). Mandelbrot, who died in 2010, would have an outsize influence on The Black Swan. In fact, the book is dedicated to him. But Taleb’s new insights into fractal forces at work in market crashes didn’t help him where it really counted at the

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risk of blowing up—rather than lots of small losses (loving to lose) and infrequent, massive jackpots. That November, Taleb submitted a paper for a Pentagon-sponsored conference on risk. Called “The Black Swan: Why Don’t We Learn That We Don’t Learn?,” it claimed that history is driven by big unpredictable

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coming because we base our future expectations on past events, like a driver navigating a road by scanning the rearview mirror. Taleb had gotten a real-world look at a looming Black Swan earlier that year when a young New York Times reporter (and future Covid-19 anti-vax conspiracy spreader) named Alex

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the fuse that lit the bomb. (Many others did as well.) Sornette around this time started to become increasingly hostile to Nassim Taleb’s Black Swans. The entire notion behind the Black Swan—that extreme earth-shaking events are impossible to predict—he believed, was radically misguided. It caused people to throw up their hands

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of nature, the lightning, the storms were the expression of the anger of the gods.” Sornette had long been familiar with Taleb. The Frenchman was a resource for The Black Swan. Indeed, Taleb credits him in the book (“Didier Sornette, always a phone call away, kept e-mailing me papers on various unadvertised, but

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hundreds of meetings in 2007. They crisscrossed the country making pitch after pitch. Not a single new investor bit on the Black Swan fund. * * * Universa may have been notably unpopular, but Taleb’s ideas were catching on, spreading beyond the close-knit circles of Wall Street’s hedge fund traders, quants, and risk

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managers. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, in a February 2004 editorial called “And Black Swans,” described Taleb’s 2003 Pentagon paper as “remarkable” and applied it to the Bush administration’s mistakes in Iraq. “Iraq is like Long-Term Capital Management,

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options—are likely to fail at the worst possible time… because they are generally (and mistakenly) based on bell-curve assumptions.” Taleb’s book became a cultural touchstone and made the Black Swan something of a universal meme for surprising bad shit going down. In the fourteen years before the book was published

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pricing finished the year strong,” Platts Daily Briefing opined. “Trump was a classic black swan event,” Lionel Shriver observed in the Telegraph. There’s a Black Swan wine, a Black Swan publisher, Black Swan yoga, even an exceedingly eccentric comic strip called Black Swan Man that portrays Taleb as a muscle-bound, costumed figure battling the evils of bitcoin and the

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Reserve and tossing off advice such as “We must always be vigilant against the problem of induction.” Misconceptions about what exactly constitutes a Black Swan endlessly tortured Taleb. People asked: “Was September 11 a Black Swan?” Yes, for the people in the World Trade Center, no for the terrorists. “The Global Financial Crisis?” No, said

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’d put the odds of collapse at 20 percent recalled forecasting it as 70 percent. At the heart of Taleb’s The Black Swan lurked a paradox, an uncomfortable contradiction—but a necessary one. Black Swans are by nature undefinable, uncontained, incomprehensible, unpredictable, uncertain, chaotic, random, wild, out-of-control crises. By naming this

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phenomenon, by describing it, defining it, Taleb was trying to do what he himself knew was impossible—to put the Black Swan in a box. To tell a story about it. It was a minor violation of another key concept in

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stocks on the cheap. Reporters suddenly wanted to know all about the secretive Black Swan trader in Santa Monica. Nearly every article featured the “Black Swan author” Nassim Taleb. The implication (or so Spitznagel thought) was that Universa was Taleb’s fund—that Taleb was making investment decisions and Spitznagel was merely along for the ride. At

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than the 39 percent gutting of the S&P. Copycats plunged into what the Wall Street press had taken to calling “black swan funds.” A strategy that hadn’t existed before Taleb and Spitznagel launched Empirica in 1999 was suddenly one of the financial world’s hottest products. It was flattering. The two

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private bankers. Capitalism was on the ropes, he said—and could collapse. As Universa’s reputation soared, so did Taleb’s. The Global Financial Crisis seemed the quintessence of a Black Swan (even though Taleb claimed it was an entirely predictable “Gray Swan”). He was in great demand, and he was taking advantage of

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4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and

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wings in Brazil can (theoretically) conjur a tornado in Texas. Sornette began with an attack on his nemesis: the Black Swan. “This is the evidence… that crises are not Black Swans, as my friend Nassim Taleb describes in his famous book, which is now a paradigmatic representation of financial crises. They are dragons,” he said

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s diagnosis of Keynes and central bank interventions is far more nuanced than the typical trader’s fuck the Fed attitude. It also, much like Taleb’s Black Swan theory, bears strong resemblances to the sit-and-wait trading strategy he followed. If ever there was a “roundabout” approach to investing, it was

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extreme skepticism about forecasting against Sornette’s finely honed mathematical models he claimed could predict extreme events—Black Swans versus Dragon Kings. “This cup is fragile,” Taleb began, pointing to a picture of a porcelain teacup on a projector. “It is fragile because it doesn’t like volatility. And it has

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volatility. Something that’s antifragile, a Talebian neologism, is made stronger when encountering disorder, chaos, volatility, etc. Like The Black Swan, the book had its roots in the crash-proof trading strategy Taleb had developed alongside Spitznagel at Empirica—all those out-of-the-money put options love volatility, the more the better

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King. A fantastic achievement!” Sornette finished and took his seat beside Taleb, who was grinning like a Cheshire cat. After mischievously gifting Sornette with a copy of The Black Swan, Taleb put a question to him. “Do you think September 11 was a Black Swan event?” “No,” Sornette replied. “For someone in the building, was

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it a Black Swan event?” Sornette shrugged. “For the pilot of the plane, was it a Black Swan event? My whole thing is, a Black Swan for the turkey is not a Black Swan for

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Sornette’s analysis was mathematically rigorous, it was not capable of making the precise predictions required to manage risk. Taleb’s primary point wasn’t about the model or the difference between Black Swans and Gray Swans and Dragon Kings. The key issue was how you trade and what you trade with—your

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which is fundamentally dynamic, not statistical. That is the underlying theme of everything I showed.” Sornette was saying that Taleb’s analysis was based on the wrong kind of math—statistics. His Black Swans were a snapshot in time, a single static picture of an extreme event. Sornette’s method, based on physics

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. Lagnado’s boss, Ted Eliopoulos, CalPERS’s chief investment officer, had recently seen a talk by Taleb and grown intrigued by the notion of making the fund’s portfolio more resilient to Black Swans with a tail-risk strategy. There was a common belief in the pension fund world that the strategies

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hit it off, having a shared view that much of the world vastly underestimated the risk of Black Swans. Read accompanied Taleb to the nearby train station. “Do you need your travel expenses covered?” he asked. Taleb chuckled. “Rupert, you do realize that I bet against the banks?” he said, referring to his

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too vague. When are risks so high that the principle needs to be invoked? To solve the conundrum, Taleb deployed his long history studying extreme events and devising trading strategies to protect against Black Swans. “We believe that the PP should be invoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic

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a study of how to live and act in a world ruled by extreme uncertainty—Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, and a book of aphorisms, The Bed of Procrustes. Like all of Taleb’s books, Skin in the Game was wide-ranging, visiting subjects all the way from complexity theory to

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of the global economy is at risk. “This is why the book’s authors developed the concept of Green Swans, inspired by the famous Black Swans of Nassim Nicholas Taleb,” Samama said. “A Green Swan is a highly certain event with multiple nonlinear and interacting causes that threatens life on Earth. Climate change

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case scenarios, the ruin problems. Accounting for that risk premium is the essence of risk pricing on Wall Street, according to Litterman. (Taleb, of course, believed such risks—Black Swans—were impossible to price.) In the case of climate risk, you need to slam on the brakes—now. Litterman began working on his

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faithful predictor of the future. Systemic risk was suddenly a hot topic. Insurance bosses were seeing Taleb’s dreaded Black Swans around every corner. Aon PLC, a British-American insurance behemoth, said it was focusing not on Black Swans—but on Gray Swans, those extreme, rare events that were in some measure predictable, like Sornette

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out his favorite hits—his lifelong focus on extremes, his love of risk-taking and hot-rod motorcycles, his successful market forecasts, his contempt for Taleb’s Black Swan concept, which he said was “wrong and dangerous” because it let people—especially bankers and politicians—off the hook when it came to their

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of Him?,” Guardian, February 16, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/feb/16/daniel-kahneman-thinking-fast-and-slow-tributes. Taleb had gotten a real-world look at a looming Black Swan Alex Berenson, “Fannie Mae’s Loss Risk Is Larger, Computers Show,” New York Times, August 7, 2003, https://www.nytimes

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Black, Fischer, 227–28 Black Monday (1987), 13, 15, 20, 38 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 12, 16, 19, 76, 82, 91, 103–4, 106, 107, 124, 129, 144, 218, 261 Black Swan funds, 24, 113, 130, 134 Black Swan Protection Protocol, 14, 15, 154–55 Black Swan Protection Protocol Fund CalPERS’s investment in, 157–58 global market response

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Donald, 61, 64, 65, 68 Sutherland, Rory, 216 Systemic Risk Masterclass webcast, 267 “Systemic Risk” memo (Taleb, Bar-Yam, and Norman), 20–23, 164 Tainter, Joseph, 202–3 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas background of, 12–13 Black Swan concept extensions by, 16 Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading experience of, 56–58, 70 concerns about the spread

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated

by Gautam Baid  · 1 Jun 2020  · 1,239pp  · 163,625 words

the swans that have been observed to date are white, doesn’t prove that all swans are white. One small observation (i.e., spotting a black swan) can conclusively disprove the statement “all swans are white” but millions of observations can hardly confirm it. Thus, disconfirmation is more rigorous than confirmation. Elon

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benefits of applying Kelly. Another key limitation is that people tend to underestimate the role of infrequent, high-impact events, or Taleb’s black swans. The probability and downside magnitude of negative black swans may not be given the necessary consideration when investors look to apply the Kelly criterion, and thus the formula, when applied

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and probabilities are unknown. In this case, the distribution of outcomes is unknown and so are the individual outcomes. This is uncertainty. This is where black swans reside. We behave in accordance with our embedded belief that we are making decisions in option number 2. We are prepared for a world much

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probable. The human mind’s tendency to completely discount six sigma and other rare events from the realm of possibility is what Taleb warns about in his book The Black Swan. We need to avoid clamoring for precise single-point predictions and instead stress-test our portfolio under a wider and darker range

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say, we live primarily in an Extremistan world, one that is full of feedback loops, is filled with interdependence, and thus is black swan–ridden. Taleb’s black swan theory refers to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequences and their dominant role in history. These events are the very reason for Vladimir Lenin’

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s saying: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Here is my exhaustive list of black swan risks for the

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coming year: 1. 2. 3. This list will always be empty because you can’t predict a black swan event. A black swan is something that comes as a complete surprise to everyone. It’s a risk that is unforeseen; therefore, by definition, it cannot be predicted. Such

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favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff…. Remember you are a Black Swan. —Nassim Nicholas Taleb Each of us has what I call an ensemble of stochastic life paths—the choices we make. You make each choice in life based

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, 2017. http://businessinsider.com/warren-buffetts-not-to-do-list-2016-10. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2014. ——. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 2010. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, and George A. Martin. “How to Prevent Other Financial

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; status quo, 135; underestimating, 134 big-ticket merger and acquisition, 227 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 64 Bionomics (Rothschild), 286 Bismarck, Otto Von, 349 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 261 black swans, 261–262 bladder theory, 192 Bloomberg, 211 blue-chip stocks, 230–231 Blumkin, Rose, 92 Bogle, John, 229 Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE), 326 bonds

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  · 27 Nov 2012  · 651pp  · 180,162 words

as a Child of Modernity Ms. Bré Has Competitors The Predictive Plus or Minus Bad Teeth The Idea of Becoming a Non-Turkey No More Black Swans BOOK III: A NONPREDICTIVE VIEW OF THE WORLD Chapter 9. Fat Tony and the Fragilistas Indolent Fellow Travelers The Importance of Lunch The Antifragility of

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not measurable (outside of casinos or the minds of people who call themselves “risk experts”). This provides a solution to what I’ve called the Black Swan problem—the impossibility of calculating the risks of consequential rare events and predicting their occurrence. Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than

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-tuning our understanding of the ordinary, and hence develop models, theories, or representations that cannot possibly track them or measure the possibility of these shocks. Black Swans hijack our brains, making us feel we “sort of” or “almost” predicted them, because they are retrospectively explainable. We don’t realize the role

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without much command-and-control instruction from an Ivy League–educated director nominated by a search committee. Antifragility is not just the antidote to the Black Swan; understanding it makes us less intellectually fearful in accepting the role of these events as necessary for history, technology, knowledge, everything. Robust Is Not

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saw, it is much easier to understand if something is harmed by volatility—hence fragile—than try to forecast harmful events, such as these oversized Black Swans. But only practitioners (or people who do things) tend to spontaneously get the point. The (Rather Happy) Disorder Family One technical comment. We keep

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, harming others. For instance, the collapse of a large institution will have effects on society. Sophistication, a certain brand of sophistication, also brings fragility to Black Swans: as societies gain in complexity, with more and more “cutting edge” sophistication in them, and more and more specialization, they become increasingly vulnerable to collapse

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subjected to randomness—and unpredictability—build a mechanism beyond the robust to opportunistically reinvent themselves each generation, with a continuous change of population and species. Black Swan Management 101: nature (and nature-like systems) likes diversity between organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism, unless you consider nature itself the immortal

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between the benign, heroic type of risk taking that is beneficial to others, in the antifragile case, and the nastier modern type related to negative Black Swans, such as the overconfidence of “scientists” computing the risks of harm from the Fukushima reactor. In the case of the former, what they call

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competition between man and natural forces, the craving of volatility by some antifragile systems, and how we make social, political (and other) systems vulnerable to Black Swans when we overstabilize them. 1 Where simplifications fail, causing the most damage, is when something nonlinear is simplified with the linear as a substitute. That

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income of a taxi driver (first) and that of an employee (second). The second graph shows moves taking place from cascade to cascade, or Black Swan to Black Swan. Human overintervention to smooth or control processes causes a switch from one kind of system, Mediocristan, into another, Extremistan. This effect applies to all manner

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economic policy makers is to stabilize the system by inhibiting fluctuations, the result tends to be the opposite. These artificially constrained systems become prone to Black Swans. Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, of the type seen in Figure 3, catching everyone off guard and undoing years of stability or, in

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part of citizens, corporations, and government (which brings fragility and kills antifragility). I believe that both markets and governments are unintelligent when it comes to Black Swan events—though, again, not Mother Nature, thanks to her construction, or more ancient types of markets (like the souks), unlike the ones we have

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IRREVERSIBILITY OF BROKEN PACKAGES The first step toward antifragility consists in first decreasing downside, rather than increasing upside; that is, by lowering exposure to negative Black Swans and letting natural antifragility work by itself. Mitigating fragility is not an option but a requirement. It may sound obvious but the point seems to

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maximum known loss. For antifragility is the combination aggressiveness plus paranoia—clip your downside, protect yourself from extreme harm, and let the upside, the positive Black Swans, take care of itself. We saw Seneca’s asymmetry: more upside than downside can come simply from the reduction of extreme downside (emotional harm) rather

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rarer quality called courage, and who make things happen. THE THALESIAN AND THE ARISTOTELIAN Now some philosophy. As we saw with the exposition of the Black Swan problem earlier in Chapter 8, the decision maker focuses on the payoff, the consequence of the actions (hence includes asymmetries and nonlinear effects). The Aristotelian

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fail-fast model), a.k.a. convex tinkering. Low-cost mistakes, with known maximum losses, and large potential payoff (unbounded). A central feature of positive Black Swans: the gains are unbounded (unlike a lottery ticket), or, rather, with an unknown limit; but the losses from errors are limited and known. FIGURE 7

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methodology will show nasty attributes when seen from the outside—it hides its qualities, not its defects. In the antifragile case (of positive asymmetries, positive Black Swan businesses), such as trial and error, the sample track record will tend to underestimate the long-term average; it will hide the qualities, not the

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In other words, it was a much more linear economy—less complex—than today. And we have more nonlinearities—asymmetries, convexities—in today’s world. Black Swan effects are necessarily increasing, as a result of complexity, interdependence between parts, globalization, and the beastly thing called “efficiency” that makes people now sail too

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do not belong to the coming times. Via negativa. What is fragile will eventually break; and, luckily, we can easily tell what is fragile. Positive Black Swans are more unpredictable than negative ones. “Time has sharp teeth that destroy everything,” declaimed the sixth-century (B.C.) poet Simonides of Ceos, perhaps starting

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to your imagination. Recall that the most fragile is the predictive, what is built on the basis of predictability—in other words, those who underestimate Black Swans will eventually exit the population. An interesting apparent paradox is that, according to these principles, longer-term predictions are more reliable than short-term ones

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, given that one can be quite certain that what is Black Swan–prone will be eventually swallowed by history since time augments the probability of such an event. On the other hand, typical predictions (not involving the

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they have always been weakened by what they think is their strength: size, which is the enemy of corporations as it causes disproportionate fragility to Black Swans. City-states and small corporations are more likely to be around, even thrive. The nation-state, the currency-printing central bank, these things called

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be quite a potent (and, empirically, a more rigorous) action. Why? Subtraction of a substance not seasoned by our evolutionary history reduces the possibility of Black Swans while leaving one open to improvements. Should the improvements occur, we can be pretty comfortable that they are as free of unseen side effects as

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what likes volatility thanks to convexity or acceleration and higher orders, since convexity is the response by a thing that likes disorder. We can build Black Swan–protected systems thanks to detection of concavity. We can take medical decisions by understanding the convexity of harm and the logic of Mother Nature’s

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; so do Russian billionaires, lobbyists, most bankers, and bureaucrats. Members are bribable provided they are given an adequate narrative, mostly with the use of casuistry. Black Swan Errors Nonpredictive Approach: Building stuff in a manner immune to perturbations—hence robust to changes in future outcomes. Thalesian versus Aristotelian: The Thalesian focuses on

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a thousand days, and every day the turkey pronounces with increased statistical confidence that the butcher “will never hurt it”—until Thanksgiving, which brings a Black Swan revision of belief for the turkey. The inverse turkey error is the mirror confusion, not seeing opportunities—pronouncing that one has evidence that someone digging

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—to the second, a lower peak but more spread out. So it causes an increase of both positive and negative surprises, both positive and negative Black Swans. FIGURE 26. Case 2 (top): Fragile. Limited gains, larger losses. Increasing uncertainty in the system causes an augmentation of mostly (sometimes only) negative outcomes,

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just negative Black Swans. Case 3 (bottom): Antifragile. Increasing randomness and uncertainty in the system raises the probability of very favorable outcomes, and accordingly expand the expected payoff. It

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all: pseudoconvexity. Local antifragility, global fragility. MEDICAL NONLINEARITIES AND THEIR PROBABILITY CORRESPONDENCE (CHAPTERS 21 & 22) FIGURE 31. Medical Iatrogenics: Case of small benefits and large Black Swan–style losses seen in probability space. Iatrogenics occurs when we have small identifiable gains (say, avoidance of small discomfort or a minor infection) and exposure

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to Black Swans with delayed invisible large side effects (say, death). These concave benefits from medicine are just like selling a financial option (plenty of risk) against small

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probability domain. As to further reading, I am avoiding the duplication of those mentioned in earlier books, particularly those concerning the philosophical problem of induction, Black Swan problems, and the psychology of uncertainty. I managed to bury some mathematical material in the text without Alexis K., the math-phobic London editor, catching

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via negativa debunking—these are illustrative. Charlatans: In the “fourth quadrant” paper published in International Journal of Forecasting (one of the backup documents for The Black Swan that had been sitting on the Web) I showed empirically using all economic data available that fat tails are both severe and intractable—hence all

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(2007). Pilots abdicate responsibility to the system: FAA report: John Lowy, AP, Aug. 29, 2011. Lucretius Effect: Fourth Quadrant discussion in the Postscript of The Black Swan and empirical evidence in associated papers. High-water mark: Kahneman (2011), using as backup the works of the very insightful Howard Kunreuther, that “protective actions

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sterilized room is in “great health”—when he is the most vulnerable. Note that the turkey problem is an evolution of Russell’s chicken (The Black Swan). Rousseau: In Contrat Social. See also Joseph de Maistre, Oeuvres, Éditions Robert Laffont. BOOK II: Modernity and the Denial of Antifragility City-states: Great

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costs leads to the superiority of systems with distributed randomness. Increase of risk upon being provided numbers: See the literature on anchoring (reviewed in The Black Swan). Also Mary Kate Stimmler’s doctoral thesis at Berkeley (2012), courtesy Phil Tetlock. Stimmler’s experiment is as follows. In the simple condition, subjects

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probability linked to skepticism: Franklin (2001). Few other philosophers go back to the real problem of probability. Fourth Quadrant: See the discussion in The Black Swan or paper Taleb (1999). Nuclear, new risk management: Private communication, Atlanta, INPO, Nov. 2011. Anecdotal knowledge and power of evidence: A reader, Karl Schluze, wrote: “An old

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interpret as political systems might come from size. Evidence in Easterly and Kraay (2000). The age of increasing fragility: Zajdenwebber, see the discussion in The Black Swan. Numbers redone recently in The Economist, “Counting the Cost of Calamities,” Jan. 14, 2012. Convexity effect on mean: Jensen (1906), Van Zwet (1966). While

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cost us one million dollars not to do something about Murray,’ O’Bryan said.” Gladwell (2009). Falsification and problems of induction: See references in The Black Swan. Smoking and overall medical effect: Burch (2009). Fractality: Mandelbrot (1983). Edgerton’s shock of the old: Edgerton (2007). Less Is More in Decision Theory

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Louis XIV to Napoleon. University of Pennsylvania Press. Daston, Lorraine, 1988, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Davidson, P., 2010, “Black Swans and Knight’s Epistemological Uncertainty: Are These Concepts Also Underlying Behavioral and Post-Walrasian Theory?” Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 32(4): 567–570. Davis

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.” Social Science Research 7: 180–196. Tainter, J., 1988, The Collapse of Complex Societies: New Studies in Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taleb, N. N., and M. Blyth, 2011, “The Black Swan of Cairo.” Foreign Affairs 90(3). Taleb, N. N., and A. Pilpel, 2007, “Epistemology and Risk Management.” Risk and Regulation 13, Summer

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with autobiographical sections, stories, parables, and philosophical, historical, and scientific discussions in nonoverlapping volumes that can be accessed in any order. ANTIFRAGILE (THIS VOLUME) THE BLACK SWAN (2007, 2010), on how high-impact but rare events dominate history, how we retrospectively give ourselves the illusion of understanding them thanks to narratives, how

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scientifically, how this makes some areas—but not others—totally unpredictable and unforecastable, how confirmatory methods of knowledge don’t work, and how thanks to Black Swan–blind “faux experts” we are prone to building systems increasingly fragile to extreme events. FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS (2001, 2004), on how we tend to

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and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-three languages. Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport. Double-tap or move

Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  · 20 Feb 2018  · 306pp  · 82,765 words

point talking about performance when it is easier to buy and sell than fry an egg, and the profound difference between dentists and speculators. THE BLACK SWAN (2007, 2010), on how high-impact but rare events dominate history, how we retrospectively give ourselves the illusion of understanding them thanks to narratives, how

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scientifically, how this makes some areas—but not others—totally unpredictable and unforecastable, how confirmatory methods of knowledge don’t work, and how thanks to Black Swan–blind “faux experts” we are prone to building systems increasingly fragile to extreme events. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES (Philosophical Aphorisms) (2010, 2016) ANTIFRAGILE (2012), on

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we can identify (anti)fragility based on nonlinear response without having to know much about the history of the process (which solves most of the Black Swan problem), and why you are alive if and only if you love (some) volatility. SKIN IN THE GAME (2018), this volume. INCERTO’S TECHNICAL

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helps by attacking, or the magnification one gets from feedback. LUDIS DE ALIENO CORIOfn2 And when a blowup happens, they invoke uncertainty, something called a Black Swan (a high-impact unexpected event), after a book by a (very) stubborn fellow, not realizing that one should not mess with a system if the

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that don’t work except on paper (because academics know practically nothing about risk), then invoke uncertainty after a blowup (that same unseen and unforecastable Black Swan and that same very, very stubborn author), and keep past income—what I have called the Bob Rubin trade. The Bob Rubin trade? Robert Rubin

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, literally insolvent, was rescued by the taxpayer, he didn’t write any check—he invoked uncertainty as an excuse. Heads he wins, tails he shouts “Black Swan.” Nor did Rubin acknowledge that he transferred risk to taxpayers: Spanish grammar specialists, assistant schoolteachers, supervisors in tin can factories, vegetarian nutrition advisors, and clerks

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the danger of universalism taken two or three steps too far—conflating the micro and the macro. Likewise the crux of the idea of The Black Swan was Platonification, missing central but hidden elements of a thing in the process of transforming it into an abstract construct, then causing a blowup. II

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operation of Time (which we capitalize) and its irreversibility requires the filtering from skin in the game. Skin in the game helps to solve the Black Swan problem and other matters of uncertainty at the level of both the individual and the collective: what has survived has revealed its robustness to

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Black Swan events and removing skin in the game disrupts such selection mechanisms. Without skin in the game, we fail to get the Intelligence of Time (a

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a long tradition of skeptical-inquiry-cum-practical-solutions—the readers of the Incerto might be familiar with the schools of skeptics (covered in The Black Swan), in particular the twenty-two-century-old diatribe by Sextus Empiricus Against the Professors. The rule is: Those who talk should do and only those

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project. Just as Eve came out of Adam’s ribs, so does each book of the Incerto emerge from the penultimate one’s ribs. The Black Swan was an occasional discussion in Fooled by Randomness; the concept of convexity to random events, the theme of Antifragile, was adumbrated in The

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Black Swan; and, finally, Skin in the Game was a segment of Antifragile under the banner: Thou shalt not become antifragile at the expense of others. Simply,

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trader (as we saw, when these people make money, they keep the profits; when they lose, someone else bears the costs while they do their Black Swan invocation). Its manifestations are so ubiquitous that it has been the backbone of every book of the Incerto. Whenever there is a mismatch between a

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the Bob Rubin risk-transfer game. Given the number of people trying to get on the money-making bus, there is a progressive accumulation of Black Swan risks in such systems. Then, boom, the systemic blowup happens.fn1 THE ROAD We will be guided by what is most lively. The ethics

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. The IYI mistakes the Near East (ancient Eastern Mediterranean) for the Middle East. The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelf, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science,” that their “technology” is in the

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from professionals in the real world is that data is not necessarily rigor. One reason I—as a probability professional—left data out of The Black Swan (except for illustrative purposes) is that it seems to me that people flood their stories with numbers and graphs in the absence of solid or

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when one is right, particularly when it is disconfirmatory empiricism, or counterexamples: only one data point (a single extreme deviation) is sufficient to show that Black Swans exist. Traders, when they make profits, have short communications; when they lose they drown you in details, theories, and charts. Probability, statistics, and data science

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called personnel departments. So there are metrics used and “evaluation forms” to fill. The minute one has evaluation forms, distortions occur. Recall that in The Black Swan I had to fill my evaluation form asking for the percentage of profitable days, encouraging traders to make steady money at the expense of hidden

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risks of Black Swans, consequential losses. Russian Roulette allows you to make money five times out of six. This has bankrupted banks, as banks lose less than one in

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was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. prime minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, ce genre de trucs. It was an interesting fifty

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a lack of tail risk. In fact, the more uncertainty about the models, the more conservative one should be. The same newspapers had lauded The Black Swan in which this very point was fleshed out clearly—so visibly the attack had nothing to do with the point I was making, rather they

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vs. Saturn. I recall, during the Lebanese war, noticing how the local conflict was metamorphosed into an “Israel vs. Iran” problem. I described in The Black Swan how war journalists who came to Lebanon got all their information from other war journalists who came to Lebanon, hence they could live in a

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conscious of the need to think in terms of one-sided inequalities: what is absent from the data should be taken into account—absence of Black Swans in the record doesn’t mean these were not there. The record is insufficient, and such asymmetry needs to be permanently present in one’s

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Macmillan. Sandis, Constantine, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2015. “Leadership Ethics and Asymmetry.” In Leadership and Ethics, ed. Boaks and Levine, 233. London: Bloomsbury. Stiglitz, J. E., 1988. “Principal and Agent.” In The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, vol. 3. London: Macmillan. Taleb, N. N., 2007. “Black Swans and the Domains of Statistics.” The American

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are always used by charlatans as a sensationalist argument). This is similar to the way ecological diversity decreases when an island gets larger (see The Black Swan). Virtue Merchandising: the debasing of virtue by using it as a marketing strategy. Classically, virtue needs to be kept private, which clashes with modern “save

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

by Michael J. Mauboussin  · 6 Nov 2012  · 256pp  · 60,620 words

well. City sizes have a much wider range of outcomes than human heights do.8 Nassim Taleb, an author and former derivatives trader, calls the extreme outcomes within power law distributions black swans. He defines a black swan as an outlier event that has a consequential impact and that humans seek to explain after the

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fact.9 In large part owing to Taleb’s efforts, more people are aware of black swans and distributions that deviate from the bell curve. What most people still don’t appreciate is the mechanism that propagates

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black swans. Here’s where critical points and phase transitions come in. Positive feedback leads to outcomes that are outliers. And critical points help explain our

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perpetual surprise at black swan events because we have a hard time understanding how such small incremental perturbations can lead to such large outcomes. We simply don’t see them

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holds the axe behind his back. If you stick around long enough, the axe will fall. The question is not if, but when. The term black swan reflects the criticism of induction by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper argued that seeing lots of white swans doesn’t prove the theory that all

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swans are white, but seeing one black swan does disprove it. So Popper’s point is that to understand a phenomenon, we’re better off focusing on falsification than on verification. But we

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systems that have phase transitions: 1. Study the distribution of outcomes for the system you are dealing with. Thanks to Taleb’s prodding, many people now associate extreme events with black swans. But Taleb makes a careful, if overlooked, distinction: if we understand what the broader distribution looks like, the outcomes—however extreme—are

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correctly labeled as gray swans, not black swans. He calls them “modelable extreme events.” In fact, scientists have done a lot of work

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event. The key is to properly prepare for whatever the system metes out, extreme or not. For the most part, people are scorched not by black swans, the unknown unknowns, but rather by their failure to prepare for gray swans. 2. Look for ah-whoom moments. As the discussion about the Millennium

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extrapolate the past into the future. Flag these systems when you see them, and slow down your decision-making procedures. Especially when navigating among adverse black swans, the key is to live to see another day. CHAPTER EIGHT Sorting Luck from Skill Why Investors Excel at Buying High and Selling Low THE

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More (New York: Hyperion, 2006); and Arthur DeVany, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry (New York: Routledge, 2004). 9. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), xvii–xviii. 10. James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter

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George Sugihara, “Ecology for Bankers,” Nature 451 (February 21, 2008): 893–895. 12. Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Taleb, The Black Swan, 40–41; and Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). For an example of how investors extrapolate, see

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. Paul J. Feltovich, Kenneth M. Ford, and Robert R. Hoffman (Menlo Park, CA, and Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press and MIT Press, 1997), 125–146. Taleb, The Black Swan, discusses a similar concept he calls the “ludic fallacy.” 15. Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge: MIT Press

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,” in The Random Character of Stock Market Prices, ed. Paul H. Cootner, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964), 369–412. This is also a core theme of Taleb, The Black Swan. See also Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 17. Paul H. Cootner, “Comments on

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, 2004. ___. “Did Lehman Brothers’ Failure Matter?” The New Yorker.com, March 9, 2009. Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, 2nd ed. New York: Thomson Texere, 2004. ___. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. Tavris, Carol

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  · 1 Jan 2001  · 111pp  · 1 words

investigation by the redoubtable Securities and Exchange Commission, and progressively felt good for acting stoically. A correspondence with a reader who was hit with a black swan, the unexpected large-impact random event (the loss of a baby) caused me to spend some time dipping into the literature on adaptation after a

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in the media: This guy Nassim thinks that markets are random, hence they are going lower, which made me the unwilling bearer of catastrophic messages. Black swans, those rare and unexpected deviations, can be both good and bad events. However, media journalism is less standardized than it appears; it attracts a significant

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am indebted to Paloma’s Donald Sussman and Tom Witz for their unusual insights; I am truly impressed by their heroic ability to understand the “black swan.” I also thank the Empirica members (we ban the use of the word employees) for fostering a climate of fierce and ruthless, truly cut-throat

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his outburst on rare events became my lifelong motto. In it we meditate on visible and invisible histories and the elusive property of rare events (black swans). The second presents a collection of probability biases I encountered (and suffered from) in my career in randomness—ones that continue to fool me. The

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a problem that has obsessed science for the past three centuries. It is called the problem of induction. I call it in this book the black swan or the rare event. Solon even understood another linked problem, which I call the skewness issue; it does not matter how frequently something succeeds if

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dozen tries, one forgets about the existence of a bullet, under a numbing false sense of security. The point is dubbed in this book the black swan problem, which we cover in Chapter 7, as it is linked to the problem of induction, a problem that has kept a few thinkers awake

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hedge fund that aimed at taking advantage of market inefficiencies. Setting aside the fact that Merton’s hedge fund blew up rather spectacularly from the black swan problem (with characteristic denial), his “founding” such a hedge fund requires, by implication, that he agrees with Shiller about the inefficiency of the market. The

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replacement to metaphysics). Needless to say that inductive statements may turn out to be difficult, even impossible, to verify, as we will see with the black swan problem—and empiricism can be worse than any other form of hogwash when it gives someone confidence (it will take me a few chapters to

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Atratus In his Treatise on Human Nature, the Scots philosopher David Hume posed the issue in the following way (as rephrased in the now famous black swan problem by John Stuart Mill): No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of

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a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion. Hume had been irked by the fact that science in his day (the eighteenth century) had experienced a swing

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borrowed the Kantian idea of the flaws in our mechanisms of perception). The testing mechanism may be faulty. However, the statement that there is a black swan is possible to make. A theory cannot be verified. To paraphrase baseball coach Yogi Berra again, past data has a lot of good in it

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and to measure their risk). They would then terminate their trade. This is called a stop loss, a predetermined exit point, a protection from the black swan. I find it rarely practiced. THANK YOU, SOLON Finally, I have to confess that upon finishing my writing of Part I, that writing about the

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’s favor, such an outcome is very possible. What do people do to survive? They maximize their odds of staying in the game by taking black-swan risks (like John and Carlos)—those that fare well most of the time, but incur a risk of blowing up. The Birthday Paradox The most

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fear of ending with nothing or the excitement of an extra $1,000. SOME ARCHITECTURAL CONSIDERATIONS Time to reveal Nero’s secret. It was a black swan. He was then thirty-five. Although prewar buildings in New York can have a pleasant front, their architecture seen from the back offers a stark

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). But somehow people “measure” risks, particularly if they are paid for it. I have already discussed Hume’s problem of induction and the occurrence of black swans. Here I introduce the scientific perpetrators. Recall that I have waged a war against the charlatanism of some prominent financial economists for a long time

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the possibility of their not understanding markets and their methods being wrong. That was not a hypothesis to be considered. I happen to specialize in black swans. Suddenly I started getting some irritating fawning respect. Drs. Merton and Scholes helped put your humble author on the map and caused interest in his

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discuss randomness from a totally new angle; philosophical but not the hard philosophy of science and epistemology as we saw in Part I with the black swan problem. It is a more archaic, softer type of philosophy, the various guidelines that the ancients had concerning the manner in which a man of

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Nero’s helicopter crashed as he was landing it near Battersea Park on a windy day. He was alone in it. In the end the black swan got its man. Postscript • THREE AFTERTHOUGHTS IN THE SHOWER Owing to the subject’s tentacles and its author’s ruminating nature, this book keeps growing

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the possibility that the premium may have been an optical illusion owing to the survivorship bias—or that the process may include the occurrence of black swans. The discussion seems to have calmed a bit after the declines in the equity markets after the events of 2000–2002. CHAPTER 9 Hot-hand

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been published in twenty-seven languages (even French) and has more than a million readers. He lives mostly in New York. Also by Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Black Swan Footnotes To return to the corresponding text, click on the reference number or "Return to text." Chapter 7 *What I call empiricism does not

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner  · 14 Sep 2015  · 317pp  · 100,414 words

another friend and colleague is not as impressed by the superforecasters as I am. Indeed, he suspects this whole research program is misguided. Enter the Black Swan Nassim Taleb is a former Wall Street trader whose thinking about uncertainty and probability has produced three enormously influential books and turned

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“black swan” into a common English phrase. For those unfamiliar with the concept, imagine you are a European living four centuries ago. You have seen many swans

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metaphor for an event so far outside experience we can’t even imagine it until it happens. But Taleb isn’t interested only in surprise. A black swan must be impactful. Indeed, Taleb insists that black swans, and black swans alone, determine the course of history. “History and societies do not crawl,” he wrote. “They make jumps.”4

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“forecasting is bunk.” Dispelling the dichotomy requires putting the beguiling black swan metaphor under the analytic microscope. What exactly is a black swan? The stringent definition is something literally inconceivable before it happens. Taleb has implied as much on occasion. If so, many events dubbed black swans are actually gray. Consider the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the

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prototypic black swan in which one dazzling sunny morning in September, a bolt

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very much under consideration and I suspected that some terrorist groups would use it sooner rather than later.”5 Other events that have been called black swans—such as the outbreak of World War I, which was preceded by more than a decade of fretting about the danger of war among the

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great powers—also fail the unimaginability test. If black swans must be inconceivable before they happen, a rare species of event suddenly becomes a lot rarer. But Taleb also offers a more modest definition of a black swan as a “highly improbable consequential event.”6 These are not hard to

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improbable but also impactful, the difficulty multiplies. So the first-generation IARPA tournament tells us nothing about how good superforecasters are at spotting gray or black swans. They may be as clueless as anyone else—or astonishingly adept. We don’t know, and shouldn’t fool ourselves that we do. Now if

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in the long run, the Good Judgment Project should only interest short-term thinkers. But history is not just about black swans. Look at the inch-worm advance in life expectancy. Or consider that an average of 1% annual global economic growth in the nineteenth century and

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a 90% chance of failing people don’t like, but a 10% chance of changing the world people love.” This is black swan investing, and it’s similar to how Taleb himself traded—very successfully—before becoming an author. But it’s not the only way to invest. A very different way is

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poker players. It pays off more often, but the returns are more modest, and fortunes are amassed slowly. It is neither superior nor inferior to black swan investing. It is different. There is another, big reason not to dismiss forecasting tournaments. What elevates a mere surprise to

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black swan status are the event’s consequences. But consequences take time to develop. On July 14, 1789, a mob took control of a prison in Paris

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into the French Revolution. That’s why, centuries later, July 14 is the national holiday of France. “The more you want to explain about a black swan event like the storming of the Bastille,” wrote the sociologist Duncan Watts, “the broader you have to draw the boundaries around what you consider to

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be the event itself.”8 In this light, black swans are not as wildly unpredictable as supposed. Three days after terrorists flew jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the US government demanded

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the Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden. Finally, almost a month after 9/11, the United States attacked. Today, when we refer to the black swan of 9/11, we mean the attacks plus the consequences, which include the invasion of Afghanistan. But that sequence of events could arguably have gone

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extent that such forecasts can anticipate the consequences of events like 9/11, and these consequences make a black swan what it is, we can forecast black swans. All That Said … I see Kahneman’s and Taleb’s critiques as the strongest challenges to the notion of superforecasting. We are far enough apart empirically and

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Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed. Thomas Gilovich, Dale Griffin, and Daniel Kahneman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 49–81. 4. Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2010), p.10. 5. Louise Richardson, What Terrorists Want (New York: Random House, 2007), pp

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. xviii–xix. 6. Taleb, The Black Swan, p. 50. 7. J. Bradford DeLong, “Cornucopia: The Pace of Economic Growth in the Twentieth Century,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series, Working

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York: HarperCollins, 1986), p. 213. 5. The oxymoronic Eleventh “Commandment” reminds us of the indispensable role of creativity. For instance, preparing for the “unprecedented”—for Black Swans like the invention of nuclear weapons, super-computers, or genetic engineering—requires lightening up on key Commandments: relying less on historical base rates and running

The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb  · 30 Nov 2010  · 57pp  · 11,522 words

ALSO BY NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan Copyright © 2010 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.,

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around my main idea of how we deal, and should deal, with what we don’t know, matters more deeply discussed in my books The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.* * My use of the metaphor of the Procrustes bed isn’t just about putting something in the wrong box; it’s

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long after they are dead. – I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.* – Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf persons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while

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with computer skills to kill people without the slightest risk to their lives. * Ludic is Latin for “related to games”; the fallacy prevalent in The Black Swan about making life resemble games (or formal setups) with crisp rules rather than the reverse. Domain dependence is when one acts in a certain way

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when errors in the representation of the unknown and understanding of random effects do not lead to adverse outcomes—fragile otherwise. The robust benefits from Black Swan events,* the fragile is severely hit by them. We are more and more fragile to a certain brand of scientific autism making confident claims about

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body), in spite of its hyped-up successes in the linear domain (physics and engineering), which give it a prestige that has endangered us. * A Black Swan (capitalized) is an event (historical, economic, technological, personal) that is both unpredicted by some observer and carries massive consequences. In spite of growth in our

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knowledge, the role of these Black Swans has been growing. * Many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition to technology when in fact I am opposing the naïve blindness to its side

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show gratitude). ABOUT THE AUTHOR NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet. A former trader, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, which has spent more than a year

Bulletproof Problem Solving

by Charles Conn and Robert McLean  · 6 Mar 2019

show probabilistic relationships, not causal ones: Just because all the swans you have seen are white, does not mean all swans are white (there are black swans in Australia.2) In many cases you will actually work on your initial tree both inductively and deductively. You will have a sense of some

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in Chapter 1? Notes 1  Margaret Webb Pressler, “The Fall of the House of Hechinger,” Washington Post, July 21, 1997. 2  See Nassim N. Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), for a deeply insightful discussion of probability and decision‐making errors. 3  Remedy DefinitionsContextualize

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talking to customers, suppliers, or better yet players in a different but related industry or space. Explicit Downside Scenario Modeling and Pre‐Mortem Analysis: Nicolas Taleb's wonderful book The Black Swan9 reminds us of the dangers of assuming normal distributions. Improbable jumps or discontinuous events do occur, and long‐tailed

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House, 2016), 170–172. 8  Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Crown Publishing, 2015). 9  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007). 10  Daniel Kahnemann, Dan Lovallo, and Olivier Sibony, “Before You Make That Big Decision,” Harvard Business

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to be asked? What analysis would you want to see undertaken before you felt comfortable with policies to address the issue? Notes 1  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Penguin, 2007). 2  Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group, Simple Heuristics That Make Us

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, 102e tackling, 107e types, 101 Big bets, 197, 201, 206 Big Short, The (Lewis), 201 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 42 Black‐Scholes valuation, 216 Black Swan, The (Taleb), 105 Body mass index (BMI), 144, 160 Book of Why, The (Pearl/Mackenzie), 150 Borrower default, prediction, 165 Bossidy, Larry, xv Boston Public School

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