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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BLACK SWAN

'Hugely engrossing ... Taleb comes across as a wonderful

companion' William Leith, Daily Telegraph

'Compelling ... intensely thought-provoking' The Times

'Taleb's book deserves our attention, and our thanks'

International Herald Tribune

'A richly enjoyable read with an important message'

Business Week

'In a world of Black Swans, the first step is understanding just

how much we will never understand' Wired

'Provokes thought and reflection on every page' Metro London

'Racy and breathtaking ... unique and entertaining'

Paul Ormerod, Focus

'A stirring polemic ... Taleb is an eclectic scholar and a rude man'
Daily Telegraph

'A turkey' Giles Foden, Guardian

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself

in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability and knowledge. Part
literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical
trader, he is currently the Dean's Professor in the Sciences of
Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His last
book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has been published in
eighteen languages. Taleb lives (mostly) in New York.
ALSO BY NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

Fooled by Randomness
 ~
The Black Swan
The Impact; of bhe Highly Improbable
Nassim Nicholas Taleb

PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London 1wc2R ORL, England
Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
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Rosebank, Johannesbuig 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London wc2R ORL, England

www.penguin.com

First published in the United States of America by The Random House Publishing Group 2007
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2007
Published in Penguin Books 2008
Revised edition 201 o
054

Copyright© Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007, 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Printed in England by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

www.greenpenguin.co.uk

Penguin Books is commiued to a sustainable

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l'MJN)Mlbfe .ourcee
future for our business, our readers and our planet.
This book is made from Forest Stewardship
Council™ certified paper.
FSC" C018179
 To Benoit Mandelbrot,
a Greek among Romans
 CONTENTS

Prologue xxi

On the Plumage of Birds xxi

What You Do Not Know xxm
Experts and "Empty Suits" XXIV

Learning to Learn xxv

A New Kind of Ingratitude xxvii
Life Is Very Unusual xxvm
Plato and the Nerd xxix
Too Dull to Write About xxx
The Bottom Line XXXll

Chapters Map xxxii

PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION

Chapter 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic 3

Anatomy of a Black Swan 3

On Walking Walks 6
"Paradise" Evaporated 7
The Starred Night 7
History and the Triplet of Opacity 8
Nobody Knows What's Going On 9
History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps 10
x CONTENTS

Dear Diary: On History Running Backward 12

Education in a Taxicab l4
Clusters 15
Where Is the Show? l7
83/4 Lbs Later 18
The Four-Letter Word of Independence 20
Limousine Philosopher 21

Chapter 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan 23

Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute 26

The Best (Worst) Advice 26

Beware the Scalable 28
The Advent of Scalability 29
Scalability and Globalization 31
Travels Inside Mediocristan 32
The Strange Country of Extremistan 33
Extremistan and Knowledge 34
Wild and Mild 35
The Tyranny of the Accident 35

Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 38

How to Learn from the Turkey 40

Trained to Be Dull 43
A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge 44
A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem 45
Sextus the (Alas) Empirical 46
A/gaze/ 47
The Skeptic, Friend of Religion 48
I Don't Want to Be a Turkey 49
They Want to Live in Mediocristan 49

Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation! 51

Zoogles Are Not All Boogies 53

Evidence 55
Negative Empiricism 56
Counting to Three 58
Saw Another Red Mini! 59
 CONTENTS xi

Not Everything 60
Back to Mediocristan 61

Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy 62

On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes 62

Splitting Brains 64
A Little More Dopamine 67
Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule 68
A Better Way to Die 70
Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past 70
The Madman's Narrative 71
Narrative and Therapy 73
To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision 74
Dispassionate Science 75
The Sensational and the Black Swan 76
Black Swan Blindness 77
The Pull of the Sensational 79
The Shortcuts 81
Beware the Brain 82
How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy 83

Chapter 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope 85

Peer Cruelty 86
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational 87
Nonlinearities 88
Process over Results 89
Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards 91
The Antechamber of Hope 92
Inebriated by Hope 92
The Sweet Trap of Anticipation 93
When You Need the Bastiani Fortress 94
El desierto de los tartaros 94
Bleed or Blowup 96

Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck:

The Problem of Silent Evidence 100

The Story of the Drowned Worshippers 100

The Cemetery of Letters 102
xii CONTENTS

How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps 105

A Health Club for Rats 107
Vicious Bias 108
More Hidden Applications 108
The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body 109
What You See and What You Don't See 110
Doctors 112
The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova 113
"I Am a Risk Taker" 115
I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias 117
The Cosmetic Because 119

Chapter 9: The Ludie Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd 122

Fat Tony 122

Non-Brooklyn John 123
Lunch at Lake Como 125
The Uncertainty of the Nerd 127
Gambling with the Wrong Dice 129
Wrapping Up Part One 131
The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface 131
Distance from Primates 132

PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT 135

--~--~---~----~~--~---~~--~-

From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincare 136

Chapter IO: The Scandal of Prediction 137

On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count 138

Black Swan Blindness Redux 141
Guessing and Predicting 142
Information Is Bad for Knowledge 142
The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit 145
What Moves and What Does Not Move 145
How to Have the Last Laugh 148
Events Are Outlandish 149
Herding Like Cattle 150
I Was "Almost" Right 151
Reality? What For? 154
"Other Than That," It Was Okay 156
 CONTENTS xiii

The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets 158

The Character of Prediction Errors 159
Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep 160
Get Another Job 163
At JFK 163

Chapter 11: How to Look for Bird Poop 165

How to Look for Bird Poop 165

Inadvertent Discoveries 166
A Solution Waiting for a Problem 169
Keep Searching 170
How to Predict Your Predictions! 171
The Nth Billiard Ball 174
Third Republic-Style Decorum 174
The Three Body Problem 176
They Still Ignore Hayek 179
How Not to Be a Nerd 181
Academic Libertarianism 183
Prediction and Free Will 183
The Grueness of Emerald 185
That Great Anticipation Machine 189

Chapter 12: Eplstemocracy, a Dream 190

Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat 191

Epistemocracy 192
The Past's Past, and the Past's Future 193
Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness 194
Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies 195
The Melting Ice Cube 196
Once Again, Incomplete Information 197
What They Call Knowledge 198

Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do If You

Cannot Predict? 201

Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap 201

Being a Fool in the Right Places 203
Be Prepared 203
The Idea of Positive Accident 203
Volatility and Risk of Black Swan 204
xiv CONTENTS

Barbell Strategy 205

"Nobody Knows Anything" 206
The Great Asymmetry 210

PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN 213

Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back 215

The World Is Unfair 215

The Matthew Effect 216
Lingua Franca 218
Ideas and Contagions 220
Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan 220
A Brooklyn Frenchman 221
The Long Tail 223
Naive Globalization 225
Reversals Away from Extremistan 227

Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud 229

The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian 229

The Increase in the Decrease 231
The Mandelbrotian 232
What to Remember 234
Inequality 234
Extremistan and the 80120 Rule 235
Grass and Trees 236
How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe 237
Love of Certainties 239
How to Cause Catastrophes 240
Quetelet's Average Monster 240
Golden Mediocrity 241
God's Error 242
Poincare to the Rescue 243
Eliminating Unfair Influence 243
"The Greeks Would Have Deified It" 244
"Yes/No" Only Please 244
A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve
Comes From 245
 CONTENTS xv

Those Comforting Assumptions 250

"The Ubiquity of the Gaussian" 251

Chapter 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness 253

The Poet of Randomness 253

The Platonicity of Triangles 256
The Geometry of Nature 256
Fractality 257
A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan 259
Pearls to Swine 260
The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning) 262
The Problem of the Upper Bound 266
Beware the Precision 266
The Water Puddle Revisited 267
From Representation to Reality 268
Once Again, Beware the Forecasters 2 70
Once Again, a Happy Solution 270
Where Is the Gray Swan? 272

Chapter 17: Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places 274

Only Fifty Years 275

The Clerks' Betrayal 275
Anyone Can Become President 277
More Horror 278
Confirmation 281
It Was Just a Black Swan 281
How to "Prove" Things 282

Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony 286

Ludie Fallacy Redux 286

Find the Phony 287
Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society? 288
The Problem of Practice 289
How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? 289
Where Is Popper When You Need Him? 290
The Bishop and the Analyst 291
Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism 292
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