The Black Swan Taleb Summary

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable discusses extreme events that everyone believes to be “highly improbable” and to be widely unexpected. Taleb calls the extreme events “Black Swans.” Taleb believes that the unexpected (“Black Swan”) is the key to understanding not only financial markets, but also history itself. When Wall Street suffered its worst single-day in modern history in 1987 Taleb had this “ah hah” moment. He then realized that “Black Swans” could happen at any time and were unpredictable. Taleb becomes aware that he lived through a “black swan” when his country, Lebanon, was thrown into the civil war of 1975. 9/11, the rise of Google, and the sinking of the Titanic are all examples of Black Swans that Taleb uses to prove his point. He states “This awareness turned my Black Swan from a problem of lucky or unlucky people in business into a problem of knowledge and science (18). Taleb believes “that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black
When looking at it, he is criticizing humans for not being able to tell the future- when honestly who can see the future? He goes on to say that experts cannot predict the future, however they can explain the past. Does this help however? No. Taleb explains that human beings are not well equipped to learn from history. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyze the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence, the missing parts in the historical system, which create the black swan. So basically what Taleb is trying to say is that you should doubt everything you know from history and past experiences, and worry about what you haven’t yet even