The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Review

The premise is fundamentally about the practical limits of knowledge. People are stupid, we know this. And our focus on the knowledge we have can make the things we don't know very dangerous precisely because they are unexpected. When there is a power law/Pareto principle, this is especially significant. The book offers this intriguing idea and supports it well. All the Gaussian curves used so you can actually say something about economics or prediction are just assumptions. The book says explicitly bad predictions can be worse than no prediction at all. The author is extremely confident in his thesis and all his critics are cast as fools. Halfway through the book, the chapters become optional and the point became overdone. Even the author acknowledged he was being repetitive. In my completionist, I read all the extra chapters and found them a drag and ended the book tired of it. But, the idea presented fundamentally changed the way I think about prediction and that made it worthwhile.