The Black Swan - Fooled by Randomness Redux

The Black Swan -The Impact of the Improbable is the expanded philosophical extension of Nassim Taleb's earlier book, Fooled by Randomness. "Fooled" was a great book for exposing the impact of chance extreme events and the problems that occur with any empiricism. No matter how many white swans we may count, there is no proof that black swans do not exist. While Fooled by Randomness was written for a trader audience, it received a wide following from all professions. The Black Swan can be viewed as the more extensive deeper discussion of the main thesis of his earlier book.

Taleb deliveries a wide ranging discussion on the core topic with extensive discussion on the historical antecedents for Black Swan thinking. Taleb can be insufferable, bombastic, erudite, brilliant, petulant, and single-minded in a single paragraph. You may not fully agree with his arguments, but he is a masterful debater and can poke holes in all of the prevailing views on forecasting. Taleb is a man on a mission to get us out of conventional thinking. His relevant lessons have and should influence all disciplines who are not focused on the potential for Black Swan events.

This extension of his earlier thinking has the same basic arguments. The short list of his theses are as follows. We do not live in a Gaussian world. Expect the unexpected. Our ability to predict the future is poor. Our knowledge is limited about what may happen in the future. Our history has not been smooth but is subject to jumps. While we think we can live in as stable world, we actually are in a environment of extremes. We use narrative to wave stories and find causality when it may not exist. We look for confirmation of what we are already thinking. Of course, these short statements of what Taleb is trying to explain does not do the topic justice. He is a masterful story-teller.

The key criticism for this work is not what he says but what to do next. He is like the party out of favor in government. Good at criticism but short on solutions. Taleb is burning down the house of Gaussian Platonic conventionalism, bu there is not an alternative to dealing with the unknown risks. Maybe awareness is enough. We may have to await another book from Taleb for those answers.