Black Swans: Stories

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Shortform note: It’s unclear how Taleb defines “predicted.” Plenty of science-fiction writers and cultural commentators anticipated recent technologies like the Internet and augmented and virtual reality.) Types of uncertainty: Extremistan vs. Mediocristan Differences between Extremistan vs. Mediocristan

Despite (or perhaps because of) their extreme unpredictability, they compel human beings to account for them—to explain after the fact that they were in fact predictable. Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-book sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference—if you add the net worth of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates to a group of 1,000 people, it will drastically shift the average.

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Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable." Except when it's not. Scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work... it's an I quote you, you quote me type of business." The first claim is only partially true. The reputation of an author is judged by their published work, but the products of science are ideas. These ideas are, in the scientific literature, judged primarily by their content. In science, a humble patent clerk can become the biggest name in theoretical physics by having the right idea. The accusation of tit-for-tat citation is ludicrous. Speak for yourself, Taleb!

I put this book down after the first chapter, but thought I would give it another chance, that I was being unfair. When I read the second chapter (which is a metaphor for what Taleb thinks is him) I puked in my shirt. This man is the most conceited person I think I've discovered through reading his garbage hypothesis. If I met Taleb, I would recommend that he read some other theories on random variables (why does he use Gaussian distribution as the only example of random distribution?), systems theory, and the scientific theory. He apparently was sleeping though these discussions. Babitz’s writing is also like the jacaranda tree in glorious bloom—bewitching an entire city, but all too brief.”— Los Angeles Review of Books

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Massage therapist,” for example, is a “nonscalable” profession. There is an upper limit on how many clients you can see—there’s only so much time in a day, and therapists’ bodies fatigue—and thus there’s only so much income you can expect from that profession. Taleb is a pretty good writer, but I thought this was a very uneven book. As I read it I was constantly alternating between "Wow, that's a really great insight, a great way of presenting it" and "Gee, who doesn't realize that?", or even "That just seems flat-out wrong". We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.” It is an inconvenient truth that humans’ predictive capabilities are extremely limited; we are continuously faced with catastrophic or revolutionary events that arrive completely unexpectedly and for which we have no plan. Yet, nevertheless, we maintain that the future is knowable and that we can adequately prepare for it. Taleb calls this tendency the scandal of prediction. Epistemic Arrogance Everything was about L.A. I'm not from L.A. or even the USA so the L.A. parts really were boring for me, which means 80% of the parts were boring in the end. She talks so much about L.A. about how amazing it is, at least she is aware that the USA is not better than Europe like most think. She really thought she can make her boyfriend move to L.A. because she wouldn't leave it of course! The love for L.A. left me speechless and I'm happy I'm not an American.