The Black Swan Taleb Summary

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable discusses extreme events that everyone believes to be “highly improbable” and to be widely unexpected. Taleb calls the extreme events “Black Swans.” Taleb believes that the unexpected (“Black Swan”) is the key to understanding not only financial markets, but also history itself. When Wall Street suffered its worst single-day in modern history in 1987 Taleb had this “ah hah” moment. He then realized that “Black Swans” could happen at any time and were unpredictable. Taleb becomes aware that he lived through a “black swan” when his country, Lebanon, was thrown into the civil war of 1975. 9/11, the rise of Google, and the sinking of the Titanic are all examples of Black Swans that Taleb uses to prove his point. He states “This awareness turned my Black Swan from a problem of lucky or unlucky people in business into a problem of knowledge and science (18). Taleb believes “that not only are some scientific results useless in real life, because they underestimate the impact of the highly improbable (or lead us to ignore it), but that many of them may be actually creating Black
Swans.”
Most of Taleb’s argument is how people are “blind” when it comes to Black Swans.
When looking at it, he is criticizing humans for not being able to tell the future- when honestly who can see the future? He goes on to say that experts cannot predict the future, however they can explain the past. Does this help however? No. Taleb explains that human beings are not well equipped to learn from history. He questions our reliance on the "narrative fallacy", the way past information is used to analyze the causes of events when so much history is actually "silent". It is the silence, the missing parts in the historical system, which create the black swan. So basically what Taleb is trying to say is that you should doubt everything you know from history and past experiences, and worry about what you haven’t yet even
considered.
In Part 2 of the book Taleb gives several tips on how to identify Black Swans and also how to “get even” with them. He shares that one must “be able to distinguish between positive and negative potential Black Swan impacts, to not seek precision in anticipating Black Swans, to seize anything that looks like a Black Swan Opportunity because there are such few chances, to set no store in government forecasts, and to waste no energy arguing with forecasters, stock analysts or economists” (206-210). To get even he repeatedly states to “worry less.”
Trying to summarize the book is very difficult, mainly because the book lacked structure. A lot of Taleb’s ideas were repeated over and over again throughout the book and I found it very difficult to follow at times. Along with it being difficult to follow, it did not help that he added a fictional character, author Yevgenia Krasnova, whose first novel became a blockbuster, while her heavily promoted second novel flopped. Taleb describes her books as exemplary black swans, succeeding when expected to fail and failing when expected to succeed. But Krasnova’s experience hardly sounds “highly improbable.” Within the writing industry, I believe this is very probable.
While I did have several problems while reading the book, there are several strengths to this book. The Black Swan deals with the fascinating topics about uncertainty and approaches it from a variety of intellectual angles, mainly the psychological sides that we are both born with and have created for ourselves that prevent our understanding of the improbable. Each one discussed reinforces his main argument but captivates independently as they are insights to the way we process information. Taleb also references numerous thinkers that are not as well known in the popular consciousness and provides wonderful anecdotes and examples from their life and work that illustrate his points and entertain the reader.
Taleb has a smug attitude and, to be honest, I'm ok with that. Taleb presents harsh truths, and states that one shouldn't rely everything on scientific models such as Gaussian distribution.
There are examples after examples that Taleb uses to prove his point. The example that sticks out to me is the turkey example. For 1000 days a turkey is fed the same amount everyday. On the 1001 day the turkey expects to be fed but instead gets slaughtered for Thanksgiving Dinner. Was the turkey expecting it? No, of course not. The reason this example, to me, makes the book is because you realize his whole purpose of writing is to inform people that the improbable is becoming more and more probable each day. All Taleb wants is for us to not become the turkey.