The one-sentence summary

Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything, and embrace uncertainty

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WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

  • Everything is essentially random. Black Swans (unpredictable events) disprove everything we think we know from time to time. Everyone assumed all swans were white until overseas travel revealed black ones – thousands of instances of one thing does not disprove the possibility of another. A turkey is fed for 1,000 days before Christmas, assuming all is fine – then it is killed. The highly expected not happening is also a Black Swan.
  • Their impact is huge, they are near impossible to predict, and yet afterwards we always try to rationalise them – an essentially pointless exercise.
  • Ignore the experts, stop trying to predict everything and embrace uncertainty.
  • It is easier to predict how an ice cube would melt into a puddle than guess the shape of an ice cube by looking at a puddle.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT IT

  • Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: he has 30,000 books. It’s what you haven’t read, what you do not know, that makes the difference.
  • Mediocristan is a land where everything is averaged and so unhelpful to the point of meaninglessness. Extremistan is where all the learning is.
  • We can learn from some important lessons:
  • We focus on small parts of what we know and use them to project what we don’t (wrongly)
  • We use narrative fallacy (stories) to fool ourselves with reasons that aren’t there
  • We behave as if Black Swans don’t exist – they clearly do
  • What we see is not necessarily all there is
  • Variability matters: “Don’t cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

  • The book is quite long and highly technical – it is not for the faint-hearted.
  • The author often veers off into anecdote.
  • He quite enjoys being obscure or obtuse.
  • You cannot approach this book like a dip-in textbook.