The Black Swan: Quotes
The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Summary
The Black Swan is about the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events, and how we tend to find simplistic explanations for them after the fact, making us blind to randomness and vulnerable to future Black Swans.
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These are the best quotes from The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If you want to read a full summary of this book for free, click here.
"It was so unexpected"
"It was so unexpected," we will say. We will spend considerable energy convincing ourselves that it was so unexpected, not foreseeable, and unpredictable. Unpredicted? Yes. Unpredictable? Not necessarily... Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them."
Section: 1, Chapter: 1
"Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine"
"We pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily and unconsciously. We continuously renarrate past events in the light of what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events occur... My point is not that memories are flawed (that point has been convincingly made by a cohort of researchers) but that the flaws are not random but designed to overestimate causality."
Section: 1, Chapter: 6
Beware the Philosopher Bureaucrat
"People can't predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it's subatomic particles that they cite as "limits of prediction." They're ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter that only the most powerful microscopes in the world can reveal to us. Our track record in predicting the future in socioeconomic life is extremely poor, yet we live under the illusion of control."
Section: 1, Chapter: 12
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