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THE BLACK SWAN
It is a highly improbable event
with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable;
it carries a massive impact; and, after the
fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it
appear less random, and more predictable, than it
was. The astonishing success of Google was a
black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas
Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything
about our world, from the rise of religions to
events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon
of black swans until after they occur? Part of the
answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are
hardwired to learn specifics when they should
be focused on generalities. We concentrate on
things we already know and time and time again
fail to take into consideration what we don't know.
We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities,
too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify,
narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to
rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible."
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves
into thinking we know more than we actually
do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and
inconsequential, while large events continue to
surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory
book, Taleb explains everything we know
about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly
simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting
from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications,
The Black Swan will change the way you
look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining
writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to
tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects
ranging from cognitive science to business to
probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark
book—itself a black swan.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB has devoted his life to
immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty,
probability, and knowledge. Part literary essayist,
part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical
trader, he is currently taking a break by serving as
the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty
at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by
Randomness, has been published in twenty languages.
Taleb lives mostly in New York.
Jacket design: Thomas Beck Stvan
Jacket art: ￡ Photodisk/Getty Images
Join our nonfiction e-newsletter by visiting www.rh-newsletters.com
Random House
New York, N.Y.
c 2007 by Random House, Inc.
Advance praise for The Black Swan
"A masterpiece." —CHRIS ANDERSON,
editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail
"Recalls the best of scientist/essayists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay
Gould." —MICHAEL SCHRAGE, author of Serious Play
"A beautifully reflective and opinionated book, illustrated with Calvinolike
fables, about the inevitable failure of attempts to reduce the complexity
of the real world to simple black-and-white formulas."
— EMANUEL DERMAN,
author of My Life as a Quant
"A fascinating and challenging critique . . . I thoroughly enjoyed this
remarkable author's outside-the-box mix of thought experiments, stories,
and epistemology." —El) WAR I) 0 . T H O R P , author of Beat the Dealer
"Nassim Taleb challenges us, his readers, to be as fearless as he is in puncturing
phony expertise. . . . Read this book."
— P H I L I P E. TETLOCK,
author of Expert Political Judgment
"There's more about the ways of the real world between the covers of The
Black Swan than in the contents of a dozen libraries."
— T O M PETERS, author of M Search of Excellence
Praise for Fooled by Randomness
"[Fooled by Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately
what Martin Luther's ninety-five theses were to the Catholic Church."
— MALCOLM GLADWELL, author of Blink
"Fascinating . . . Taleb will grab you." —PETER L. BERNSTEIN,
author of Against the Gods
I S B N 978-1-4000-6351-2
A L S O BY N A S S I M N I C H O L A S T A L EB
Fooled by Randomness
THE BLACK SWAN
RANDOM HOUSE Q NEW YORK
Copyright ? 2007 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., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered
trademarks of Random House, Inc.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Taleb, Nassim.
The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable /
Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: Part one—Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek
validation—Part two—We just can't predict—Part three—
Those gray swans of extremistan—Part four—The end.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6351-2
1. Uncertainty (Information theory)—Social aspects.
2. Forecasting. I. Title.
Q375.T35 2007
003'.54—dc22 2006051093
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
www.atrandom.com
98 76
Book design by Casey Hampton
To Beno?t Mandelbrot,
a Greek among Romans
CONTENTS
Prologue xvii
On the Plumage of Birds xvii
What You Do Not Know xix
Experts and "Empty Suits" XX
Learning to Learn xxi
A New Kind of Ingratitude xxii
Life Is Very Unusual xxiv
Plato and the Nerd XXV
Too Dull to Write About xxvi
The Bottom Line xxvii
Chapters Map xxviii
PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION 1
Chapter 1 : The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic 3
Anatomy of a Black Swan 3
On Walking Walks 6
"Paradise" Evaporated 7
The Starred Night 7
History and the Triplet of Opacity 8
Nobody Knows What's Going On 9
History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps 10
x CONTENTS
Dear Diary: On History Running Backward 12
Education in a Taxicab 14
Clusters 15
Where Is the Show? 17
83/4 Lbs Later 18
The Four-Letter Word of Independence 20
Limousine Philosopher 21
Chapter 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan 23
Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute 26
The Best (Worst) Advice 26
Beware the Scalable 28
The Advent of Scalability 29
Scalability and Globalization 31
Travels Inside Mediocristan 32
The Strange Country of Extremistan 33
Extremistan and Knowledge 34
Wild and Mild 35
The Tyranny of the Accident 35
Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 38
How to Learn from the Turkey 40
Trained to Be Dull 43
A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge 44
A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem 45
Sextus the (Alas) Empirical 46
Algazel 47
The Skeptic, Friend of Religion 48
J Don't Want to Be a Turkey 49
They Want to Live in Mediocristan 49
Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation! 51
Zoogles Are Not All Boogies 53
Evidence 55
Negative Empiricism 56
Counting to Three 58
Saw Another Red Mini! 59
Not Everything
Back to Mediocristan
Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy
On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes
Splitting Brains
A Little More Dopamine
Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule
A Better Way to Die
Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past
The Madman's Narrative
Narrative and Therapy
To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision
Dispassionate Science
The Sensational and the Black Swan
Black Swan Blindness
The Pull of the Sensational
The Shortcuts
Beware the Brain
How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy
Chapter 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope
Peer Cruelty
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
Nonlinearities
Process over Results
Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards
The Antechamber of Hope
Inebriated by Hope
The Sweet Trap of Anticipation
When You Need the Bastiani Fortress
El desierto de los tartaros
Bleed or Blowup
Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck:
The Problem of Silent Evidence
The Story of the Drowned Worshippers
The Cemetery of Letters
xii CONTENTS
How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps
A Health Club for Rats
Vicious Bias
More Hidden Applications
The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body
What You See and What You Don't See
Doctors
The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova
"I Am a Risk Taker"
I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias
The Cosmetic Because
Chapter 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd
Fat Tony
Non-Brooklyn John
Lunch at Lake Como
The Uncertainty of the Nerd
Gambling with the Wrong Dice
Wrapping Up Part One
The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface
Distance from Primates
PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT
From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré
Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction
On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count
Black Swan Blindness Redux
Guessing and Predicting
Information Is Bad for Knowledge
The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit
What Moves and What Does Not Move
How to Have the Last Laugh
Events Are Outlandish
Herding Like Cattle
I Was "Almost" Right
Reality? What For?
"Other Than That," It Was Okay
C O N T E N T S xiii
The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets 158
The Character of Prediction Errors 159
Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep 160
Get Another Job 163
At JFK 163
Chapter 11 : How to Look for Bird Poop 165
How to Look for Bird Poop 165
Inadvertent Discoveries 166
A Solution Waiting for a Problem 169
Keep Searching 170
How to Predict Your Predictions! 171
The Nth Billiard Ball 174
Third Republic-Style Decorum 174
The Three Body Problem 176
They Still Ignore Hayek 179
How Not to Be a Nerd 181
A cademic Libertarianism 183
Prediction and Free Will 183
The Grueness of Emerald 185
That Great Anticipation Machine 189
Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream 190
Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat 191
Epistemocracy 192
The Past's Past, and the Past's Future 193
Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness 194
Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies 195
The Melting Ice Cube 196
Once Again, Incomplete Information 197
What They Call Knowledge 198
Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You
Cannot Predict? 201
Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap 201
Being a Fool in the Right Places 203
Be Prepared 203
The Idea of Positive Accident 203
Volatility and Risk of Black Swan 204
xiv CONTENTS
Barbell Strategy
"Nobody Knows Anything"
The Great Asymmetry
PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back
The World Is Unfair
The Matthew Effect
Lingua Franca
Ideas and Contagions
Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan
A Brooklyn Frenchman
The Long Tail
Na?ve Globalization
Reversals Away from Extremistan
Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud
The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian
The Increase in the Decrease
The Mandelbrotian
What to Remember
Inequality
Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule
Grass and Trees
How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe
Love of Certainties
How to Cause Catastrophes
Quételet's Average Monster
Golden Mediocrity
God's Error
Poincaré to the Rescue
Eliminating Unfair Influence
"The Greeks Would Have Deified It"
"Yes/No" Only Please
A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve
Comes From
C O N T E N T S xv
Those Comforting Assumptions 250
"The Ubiquity of the Gaussian" 251
Chapter 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness 253
The Poet of Randomness 253
The Platonicity of Triangles 256
The Geometry of Nature 256
Fractality 257
A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan 259
Pearls to Swine 260
The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning) 262
The Problem of the Upper Bound 266
Beware the Precision 266
The Water Puddle Revisited 267
From Representation to Reality 268
Once Again, Beware the Forecasters 270
Once Again, a Happy Solution 270
Where Is the Gray Swan? 272
Chapter 17: Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places 274
Only Fifty Years 275
The Clerks' Betrayal 275
Anyone Can Become President 277
More Horror 278
Confirmation 281
It Was Just a Black Swan 281
How to "Prove" Things 282
Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony 286
Ludic Fallacy Redux 286
Find the Phony 287
Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society? 288
The Problem of Practice 289
How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? 289
Where Is Popper When You Need Him? 290
The Bishop and the Analyst 291
Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism 292
xvi CONTENTS
293
Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan 295
When Missing a Train Is Painless 297
The End 297
Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans 299
Acknowledgments 301
Glossary 307
Notes 311
Bibliography 331
Index 359
PART FOUR: THE END
PROLOGUE
ON THE PLUMAGE OF BIRDS
Before the discovery of Australia, people in the Old World were convinced
that all swans were white, an unassailable belief as it seemed completely
confirmed by empirical evidence. The sighting of the first black swan
might have been an interesting surprise for a few ornithologists (and others
extremely concerned with the coloring of birds), but that is not where
the significance of the story lies. It illustrates a severe limitation to our
learning from observations or experience and the fragility of our knowledge.
One single observation can invalidate a general statement derived
from millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. All
