On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. Imagine, says Taleb, the problem of turkeys: "Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race 'looking out for its best interests', as a politician will say. It is the silence - the gap - the missing energy in the historical system, which produces the black swan. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyse the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". The other quality of black swans is that the events themselves have wide-ranging, society-changing effects that go far beyond their initial apparent import. The underlying probability of these black swans has been "mispriced" as if they were undervalued stocks or other containers of latent value. "Black swan" is a catch-all phrase for "outliers" or wildly unexpected events and processes: something such as 9/11, for instance, or the rise of Google. Until the 19th century and the discovery of mutant black swans in Australia, it was assumed all swans were white. But that may well have been a hostage to fortune, because Taleb's follow-up, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is not quite so smart, alas.
A bestseller in 18 countries, it was selected by Fortune magazine as one of "The Smartest Books of All Time". Mistrusting the "bell-curve" models used by many financial institutions to mitigate risk, he wrote a book called Fooled by Randomness about the delusions of control and reliability under which labour much of Wall Street, many other businesses - and, indeed, individual human beings.įooled by Randomness (2001) is a brilliant book. Of Lebanese - or, as he preferred, Levantine - descent but working in New York, he was an option trader and quantative analyst. Once upon a time there was a clever young financial professional called Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
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