The Black Swan by Naseem Taleb

Summary

I found this book to be interesting at times but lacking a strong singular thread to pull all the little chapters together. It has some good ideas in it, I just wouldn't say this book is about black swan events.

Quotes

the Platonic fold is where our representation of reality ceases to apply - but we do not know it. (p. 19)

When things change which we consider to be static. Understanding that a greater number of things are dynamic than meets the eye. A naive person might walk down a street and consider every object stationary, but if you've seen accident videos you understand that signs, sidewalks and poles can and do collapse.

This quote makes me want to delineate several of these folds starting with things we take for granted: internet access, electricity, food, health.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. (p. 84)

Taleb makes a good case that our need to construct narratives can do us wrong. I liked this quote because it identified positively what to seek out. Experimentation, experience and clinical knowledge are the things to focus and build upon.

your happiness depends far more on the number of instances of positive feelings, what psychologists call "positive affect" than on their intensity when they hit. (p. 91)

This is comforting. Just have fun! There's no reason why fun can't add up to results.

[the silent evidence] are the ones who need us the most - not just our financial help but our attention and kindness. (p. 110)

The greatest number of casualties and amount of suffering come from the accepted phenomena of daily life. This triggered for me a desire to reconsider where the greatest amount of suffering can be eased for the lowest price. Food, shelter and hygiene are fundamental.

Denarrate. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. (p. 133)

The best practical advice of the book so far. This reminds me of with the Kahneman/Tversky's "keeping one hand always on the data."

We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. (p. 152)

Humility.

using the argument about the depth of the river... it is the lower bound of estimates (i.e. the worst case) that matters when engaging in a policy. (p. 162)

Error estimates are missing in many places. This idea of looking at the worst case where error bounds are given is something to keep in mind. It's tempting to think in averages even though the worst plausible case may yield better results.

to understand the future to the point of being able to predict it, you need to incorporate elements from this future itself. (p. 172)

To predict the future requires predicting the innovations that will shape that future. In many cases, predicting a technology is enough to cause it to be developed. Opportunity is everywhere.

Montaigne was well grounded in the classics and wanted to meditate on life, death, education, knowledge, and some not uninteresting biological aspects of human nature. (p. 191)

Reminds me of Sivers, and how he addresses anything and everything.

The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right. (p. 192)

Since Taleb meanders and reiterates a lot, I keep looking for good summary sentences about The Black Swan, what it means and what it's good for. This is as good as it gets.

Table 4 (p. 284)

This is a good table to run through as a kind of checklist when thinking about potential black swans to avoid.

if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys: ... it would be more "efficient" if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis. (p. 312)

This is in the additional section On Robustness and Randomness. Reminds me of the sharing economy with all its drive toward rentals and subscriptions. Things tend toward efficiency but the real world likes to work against that with edge cases and random outliers. Like Thuan used to say "when you give millions of rides per day one-in-a-million events happen daily." The point is to protect yourself against those rare events.

Globalization might give the appearance of efficiency, but the operating leverage and the degrees of interaction between parts will cause small cracks in one spot to percolate through the entire system. (p. 313)

The Suez canal blockage and Covid have both created echoes but this quote seems to be more about information reaching many parts of the system causing damaging coincidental actions. Imagine if everyone were to turn on power-hungry appliances at the same time. Actually what if that little smart grid gets hacked. What I'm learning here is that things we think are solid are incredibly fragile. Makes one want to revisit emergency preparedness.

"Happy is he who owes nothing." (p. 313)

Debt is unnatural. Does nature borrow? Searched a while and apparently not. Resource deficiencies operate like debt but aren't quite the same.