- Tags:: #📚Books , [[Economics]], [[Career tips]] - Author:: [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]] - Liked:: #4/5 - Link:: [The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable) - Source date:: [[2007-04-17]] - Read date:: [[2022-07-03]] - Cover:: ![[cover_black_swan.png|100]] ## Why did I want to read it? Loved [[📖 Antifragile]] and heard a reference comparing "stable" jobs against "risky" jobs that interested me a lot given that I was facing a similar decision. ## What did I get out of it? A Black Swan is an event that: it's an outlier, has extreme impact, and we build explanations for it after the fact, not before (p. xxii). ### Highlights > The Idea of Robustness: Why do we formulate theories leading to projections and forecasts without focusing on the robustness of these, theories and the consequences of the errors? It is much casier to deal with the Black Swan problem if so focus on robustness to errors rather than improving predictions. (p. xxiv) ^f268ff >Another related human impediment comes from excessive focus on what we do know: **we tend to learn the precise, not the general.** What did people learn from the 9/11 episode? Did they learn that some events, owing to their dynamics, stand largely outside the realm of the predictable? No. Did they learn the built-in defect of conventional wisdom! No. What did they figure out? They learned precise rules for avoiding Islamic prototerrorists and tall buildings (...). We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. **Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting.** (p. xxvi) ^d391f9 > Assume that a legislator with courage, influence, intellect, vision, and perseverance manages to enact a law that goes into universal effect and employment on September 10, 2001; it imposes the continuously locked bulletproof doors in every cockpit (at high costs to the struggling airlines)— just in case terrorists decide to use planes to attack the World Trade Center in New York City. I know this is lunacy, but it is just a thought experiment (I am aware that there may be no such thing as a legislator with intellect, courage, vision, and perseverance; this is the point of the thought experiment). The legislation is not a popular measure among the airline personnel, as it complicates their lives. But it would certainly have prevented 9/11. The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statues in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. "Joe Smith, who helped avoid the disaster of 9/11, died of complications of liver disease." Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office. (p. xxvii) ^4fb914 > Who gets rewarded, the central banker who avoids a recession or the one who comes to "correct" his predecessors' faults and happens to be there during some economic recovery? Who is more valuable, the politician who avoids a war or the one who starts a new one (and is lucky enough to win)? It is the same logic reversal we saw earlier with the value of what we don't know; **everybody knows that you need more prevention than treatment, but few reward acts of prevention.** (p. xxviii) ^47b089