Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black swan. Under the sign of unpredictability. The idea of limitation will help us make the right choice

About the book

Original title: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
First edition: April 17, 2007
Number of pages: 736
Publishers: Azbuka-Atticus, KoLibri
Editor: Marina Tyunkina
Genre: Aphorisms and quotes
Age restrictions: 16+

Unpredictable events are the engine of all humanity. Over the last decade alone, humanity has experienced a number of severe disasters, shocks and cataclysms that do not fit into the framework of the most fantastic predictions. 52-year-old financial guru Nassim Taleb tried to convey these thoughts to the reader. His creation is an invaluable milestone in shaping the consciousness of the ideal investor.

Nassim Taleb calls such unpredictable events Black Swans. He is convinced that it is they who give impetus to both history as a whole and the existence of each individual person. And to succeed, you need to be prepared for them.

The name “Black Swan” is by no means accidental. Have you seen black swans? Are you sure that such people do not exist and that it is impossible to meet them? All people were sure of this, until the discovery of the continent of Australia occurred; this event radically changed people’s worldview about the possible color of these birds. The author personifies with the “Black Swan” an event that simply should not have happened, but it does. It is anomalous, no one expects to encounter it, the event has enormous power and fate.

Immediately after the release of “Black Swan,” the author brilliantly demonstrated his “non-theory” in practice: against the backdrop of the financial crisis, Nassim Taleb’s company earned (not lost!) half a billion dollars for investors. But his work is not an economics textbook. These are the thoughts of a very extraordinary person about life and how to find your place in it. In a postscript essay he later wrote, “On the Secrets of Sustainability,” Taleb gives a witty rebuke to those orthodox economists who took the anti-teaching he created with hostility.

The first edition of the book appeared in 2007 and was a commercial success. The book spent 36 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. A second expanded edition appeared in 2010.

The book is part of Taleb's four-volume philosophical essay on uncertainty, entitled Incerto, and covers the following books: Antifragile (2012), The Black Swan (2007-2010), Fooled by Randomness (2001) and Procrustean Bed (2010) -2016).

The collection of Nassim Taleb's aphorisms included in the book is a brilliant quintessence of his original ideas.

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Quotes from the book “Black Swan. Under the sign of unpredictability"

The first main postulate: throws do not depend on each other. The coin has no memory. Just because you get heads or tails doesn't mean you'll have better luck next time. The ability to toss a coin does not come with time. If you introduce a parameter such as memory or throwing skill, this whole Gaussian structure will shake.
Try not to call those who had no other choice heroes.
Greatness begins by replacing hatred with polite contempt.
The tragedy is that most of the phenomena that seem random to you are actually natural - and vice versa, which is even worse.
When I ask someone to name three modern technologies, who have changed the world the most, usually answer me that it is a computer, the Internet and a laser. All these technical innovations appeared suddenly, unpredictably, were not appreciated at the time of discovery, and even when they began to be used, the attitude towards them remained skeptical for a long time. These were breakthroughs in science. These were Black Swans.
Some thank you for what you gave them, while others blame you for what you did not give them.
To evaluate a person, think about the difference between your impressions of your very first and most recent meeting with him.
We find the most reasons to help those who need us least.
Art is a one-way conversation with the invisible.
That is, my advice to you: experiment as much as possible, trying to catch as many Black Swans as possible.
It is customary to say: “He is wise who knows how to foresee the future.” No, he is truly wise who knows that the distant future is unknown to anyone.
The success of human endeavors, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their results.
I will say more: scholarship without erudition leads to disaster.
The three most dangerous addictions: heroin, carbohydrates, monthly salary.
And the best basis for confidence is extreme politeness and friendliness, which allows you to manipulate people without offending them.
I really hope that someday scientists and politicians will rediscover what our ancestors always knew: the most valuable thing in human culture is respect.
The double curse of modern civilization: it forces us to grow old earlier and live longer.
True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, the unconditional over the conditional.
Half of all the suckers in the world don’t understand: what you don’t love, someone else can love (even you yourself can love it later), and vice versa.
Hate is much harder to fake than love. You've probably heard about fake love, but you've hardly heard about fake hatred.
Everyone knows that prevention should be given more attention than therapy, but few give thanks for prevention.
Books read are much less important than books not read.
For those who predict the future, we are always suckers.
The player who plays this game does not receive a material reward, he has a different currency - hope.
George Soros, before making a bet, collects data that could disprove his original theory.
To predict the future, it is necessary to take into account the innovations that will appear there.
We attribute our successes to our skill and our failures to external events beyond our control. Namely, accidents. We take responsibility for the good, but not for the bad. This allows us to think that we are better than others - no matter what we do.
An idea begins to seem interesting as soon as you begin to be afraid to carry it to its logical conclusion.
When a person says, “I'm not that stupid,” it usually means that he is much stupider than he thinks.
However, the fact remains that you can judge what is wrong, but not what is right. Not all information is equal.
It takes a lot of intelligence and confidence to admit that what is needed is not really needed.
The only measure of success for me is how much time you have to kill.
Karl Marx, a famous dreamer, found that a slave can be controlled much better if he is convinced that he is a hired worker.
Extinction begins with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends when some memories are replaced by others.
“Wealth” is a meaningless term, without an absolute and rigid criterion for its measurement; it is better to use the difference value “lack of wealth”: this is the difference between what you have and what you would like to have (at a given point in time)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Pages: 391

Estimated reading time: 5 hours

Year of publication: 2009

Language: Russian

Started reading: 6288

Description:

"Black Swan" is not an economics textbook. These are the thoughts of a very extraordinary person about life and how to find your place in it.
Over the last decade alone, humanity has experienced a number of severe shocks: September 11, 2001, the war in Ossetia, the global financial crisis. All these events, which seem natural to us now, seemed absolutely impossible until they happened. Forty-nine-year-old Lebanese, Sorbonne graduate and New York financial guru Nassim Taleb calls such unpredictable events Black Swans. He is convinced that it is they who give impetus to both history as a whole and the existence of each individual person. And to succeed, you need to know how to handle them. Immediately after the publication of this book, the author brilliantly demonstrated his “non-theory” in practice: against the backdrop of the financial crisis, Taleb’s company earned (not lost!) half a billion dollars for investors.
From Wall Street's leading heretic who stood alone against a legion of futurists and analysts, Nassim Taleb has emerged as a figure whose influence extends far beyond the financial world.

Black swan. Under the sign of unpredictability

Dedicated to Benoit Mandelbrot, a Greek among the Romans.

About bird plumage

Before the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. Meeting With The first black swan must have greatly surprised ornithologists (and in general anyone who is for some reason sensitive to the color of bird feathers), but this story is important for another reason. It shows within what strict boundaries of observation or experience our learning occurs and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can negate an axiom that has been developed over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. To refute it, one (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough.

I go beyond this logical-philosophical question into the realm of empirical reality, which has interested me since childhood. What we will call a Black Swan (with a capital B) is an event that has the following three characteristics.

Firstly, it abnormal, because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous impact. Thirdly, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after of how it happened, making an event initially perceived as a surprise understandable and predictable.

Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact and retrospective (but not forward) predictability. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world, from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - approximately ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intense during the period industrial revolution when the world began to become more complex, and daily life- the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news we read from newspapers - has left the well-worn rut.

Think how little your knowledge of the world would have helped you, “or before the war of 1914 you suddenly wanted to imagine the further course of history. (Don't fool yourself by remembering what your boring school teachers filled your head with.) For example, you could have foreseen Hitler's rise to power and world war? And the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? What about the spread of the Internet? And what about the market crash in 1987 (and a completely unexpected revival)? Fashion, epidemics, habits, ideas, the emergence of artistic genres and schools - everything follows the “Black Swan” dynamics. Literally everything that has any significance.

The combination of low predictability and power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but that’s not what our book is about. It's mainly about our reluctance to admit that it exists! And I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joe and me, but almost all representatives of the so-called social sciences, which for more than a century have been flattering themselves with the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. Application of non-specific sciences to problems real world gives a ridiculous effect. I have seen this happen in economics and finance. Ask your “portfolio manager” how he calculates risks. He will almost certainly call you exclusion criterion Black Swan probability - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual fraud is dressed up in mathematical clothes). And so it is in all humanitarian spheres.

The main point this book makes is our blindness to randomness, especially on a large scale; Why do we, scientists and ignoramuses, geniuses and mediocrities, count pennies, but forget about millions? Why do we focus on the little things rather than the possible big events, despite their very obvious gigantic impact? And - if you haven't missed the thread of my reasoning yet - why does reading a newspaper reduce our knowledge of the world?

It is easy to understand that life is determined by the cumulative effect of a series of significant shocks. You can become aware of the role of Black Swans without leaving your chair (or bar stool). Here's a simple exercise for you. Take your own life. List significant events and technological improvements that have occurred since you were born, and compare them with how they were seen in the future. How many of them arrived on schedule? Look at your personal life, your choice of profession or meetings with loved ones, leaving your homeland, the betrayals you had to face, sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these events go as planned?

What you don't know

Black Swan logic does what you don't know much more important than what you know. After all, if you think about it, many Black Swans came into the world and shook it precisely because no one was waiting for them.

Take the terrorist attacks of September 2001: if this kind of danger could have been foreseen on September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighter planes would have been patrolling around the World Trade Center towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed on the planes, and the attack would not have taken place. Dot. Something else could have happened. What exactly? Don't know.

Isn't it strange that an event happens precisely because it should not have happened? How to protect yourself from this? If you know something (for example, that New York is an attractive target for terrorists) - your knowledge is worthless if the enemy knows that you know it. It's strange that in a strategy game like this, what you know may not matter at all.

This applies to any activity. Take, for example, the “secret recipe” for phenomenal success in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, someone would have already invented it and it would have become something trivial. To get ahead of everyone, you need to come up with an idea that is unlikely to occur to the current generation of restaurateurs. It should be completely unexpected. The less predictable the success of such an enterprise, the fewer competitors it has and the greater the likely profit. The same applies to the shoe or book business - or, in fact, to any business. The same applies to scientific theories - no one is interested in listening to platitudes. The success of human endeavors, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their results.

Remember the 2004 Pacific tsunami. If it had been expected, it would not have caused such damage. The affected areas would have been evacuated and an early warning system would have been activated. Forewarned is forearmed.

Experts and " empty suits"

Failure to predict anomalies leads to failure to predict the course of history, if we take into account the share of anomalies in the dynamics of events.

But we behave as if we can predict historical events, or even worse, as if we can change the course of history. We forecast budget deficits and oil prices for a thirty-year period, not realizing that we cannot know what they will be next summer. The cumulative errors in political and economic forecasts are so enormous that when I look at the list of them, I want to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. What is surprising is not the scale of our incorrect forecasts, but the fact that we are unaware of it. This is especially troubling when we get involved in deadly conflicts: wars are unpredictable by their very nature (and we don't know that). Because of this lack of understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between provocation and action, we can easily provoke the appearance of a Black Swan with our aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a set of chemical reagents.

Our inability to forecast in an environment infested with Black Swans, coupled with a general lack of understanding of this state of affairs, means that some professionals who consider themselves experts, in fact, are not. If you look at their track record, it becomes clear that they understand their field no better than the person on the street, only they are much better at talking about it or, even more dangerous, they cloud our brains with mathematical models. They also mostly wear a tie.

Because Black Swans are unpredictable, we should adapt to their existence (instead of naively trying to predict them). We can achieve a lot if we focus on anti-knowledge, that is, on what we don’t know. Among other things, you can tune in to catch happy Black Swans (those that give a positive effect), if possible, going towards them. In some areas - for example in scientific research or in venture investments, betting on the unknown is extremely profitable, because, as a rule, when you lose, the losses are small, and when you win, the profits are huge. We will see that, contrary to the claims of social scientists, almost all important discoveries and technical inventions were not the result of strategic planning - they were just Black Swans. Scientists and businessmen should rely as little as possible on planning and improvise as much as possible, trying not to miss the opportunity. I disagree with the followers of Marx and Adam Smith: the free market works because it allows a person to “catch” luck through gambling trial and error, and not to receive it as a reward for diligence and skill. That is, my advice to you: experiment as much as possible, trying to catch as many Black Swans as possible.

Before the discovery of Australia, the inhabitants of the Old World were convinced that all swans were white. Their unshakable confidence was fully confirmed by experience. The sighting of the first black swan must have been a big surprise to ornithologists (and indeed anyone who is in any way sensitive to the color of a bird's feathers), but the story is important for another reason. It shows within what strict boundaries of observation or experience our learning occurs and how relative our knowledge is. A single observation can negate an axiom that has been developed over several millennia, when people admired only white swans. To refute it, one (and, they say, rather ugly) black bird was enough.

Firstly, it abnormal, because nothing in the past foreshadowed it. Secondly, it has enormous impact. Third, human nature forces us to come up with explanations for what happened after of how it happened, making an event initially perceived as a surprise understandable and predictable.

Let's stop and analyze this triad: exclusivity, impact and retrospective (but not forward) predictability. These rare Black Swans explain almost everything that happens in the world - from the success of ideas and religions to the dynamics of historical events and the details of our personal lives. Since we emerged from the Pleistocene - about ten thousand years ago - the role of Black Swans has increased significantly. Its growth was especially intense during the Industrial Revolution, when the world began to become more complex, and everyday life - the one we think about, talk about, which we try to plan based on the news we read from the newspapers - went off the beaten track.

Think how little your knowledge of the world would help you if, before the war of 1914, you suddenly wanted to imagine the further course of history. (Just don't fool yourself by remembering what your boring school teachers filled your head with.) For example, could you have foreseen Hitler's rise to power and a world war? And the rapid collapse of the Soviet bloc? And the outbreak of Muslim fundamentalism? What about the spread of the Internet? And what about the market crash in 1987 (and a completely unexpected revival)? Fashion, epidemics, habits, ideas, the emergence of artistic genres and schools - everything follows the “Black Swan” dynamics. Literally everything that has any significance.

The combination of low predictability and power of impact turns the Black Swan into a mystery, but that’s not what our book is about. It's mainly about our reluctance to admit that it exists! And I don’t mean just you, your cousin Joe and me, but almost all representatives of the so-called social sciences, which for more than a century have been flattering themselves with the false hope that their methods can measure uncertainty. Applying vague science to real world problems has a ridiculous effect. I have seen this happen in economics and finance. Ask your “portfolio manager” how he calculates risks. He will almost certainly call you exclusion criterion Black Swan probability - that is, one that can be used to predict risks with about the same success as astrology (we will see how intellectual fraud is dressed up in mathematical clothes). And so it is in all humanitarian spheres.

The main point this book makes is our blindness to randomness, especially on a large scale; Why do we, scientists and ignoramuses, geniuses and mediocrities, count pennies, but forget about millions? Why do we focus on the little things rather than the possible big events, despite their very obvious gigantic impact? And - if you have not yet missed the thread of my reasoning - why reading a newspaper reduces our knowledge of the world?

What you don't know

Take the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: if this kind of danger could foresee On September 10, nothing would have happened. Fighter planes would have been patrolling around the World Trade Center towers, interlocking bulletproof doors would have been installed on the planes, and the attack would not have taken place. Dot. Something else could have happened. What exactly? Don't know.

Isn't it strange that an event happens precisely because it should not have happened? How to protect yourself from this? If you know something (for example, that New York is an attractive target for terrorists) - your knowledge is invalidated if the enemy knows that you know it. It's strange that in a strategy game like this, what you know may not matter at all.

This applies to any activity. Take, for example, the “secret recipe” for phenomenal success in the restaurant business. If it were known and obvious, someone would have already invented it and it would have become something trivial. To get ahead of everyone, you need to come up with an idea that is unlikely to occur to the current generation of restaurateurs. It should be completely unexpected. The less predictable the success of such an enterprise, the fewer competitors it has and the greater the likely profit. The same applies to the shoe business or the book business - or, in fact, to any business. The same applies to scientific theories - no one is interested in listening to platitudes. The success of human endeavors, as a rule, is inversely proportional to the predictability of their results.

Experts and “empty suits”

Failure to predict anomalies leads to failure to predict the course of history, if we take into account the share of anomalies in the dynamics of events.

But we behave as if we can predict historical events, or even worse, as if we can change the course of history. We forecast budget deficits and oil prices thirty years out, not realizing that we cannot know what they will be next summer. The cumulative errors in political and economic forecasts are so enormous that when I look at the list of them, I want to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming. What is surprising is not the scale of our incorrect forecasts, but the fact that we are unaware of it. This is especially troubling when we get involved in deadly conflicts: wars are unpredictable by their very nature (and we don't know that). Because of this lack of understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between provocation and action, we can easily provoke the appearance of a Black Swan with our aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a set of chemical reagents.

We live in a world where events rapidly replace each other. If previously the transition from one form of social organization to another could take centuries, now each new decade represents, in fact, a different era. In the last 20-30 years alone, the planet has experienced more upheavals than in the entire history of mankind. Many phenomena not only completely do not obey any laws of logic or mathematics, but in their unpredictability even surpass the works of science fiction authors.

About the author

The author of the work, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a Lebanese-born, US-educated economist and trader. In 1983, he received an MBA from the Wharton School of Business and also defended his doctorate in economics. Since 2008, Nassim Taleb has lectured on risk analysis at the New York Polytechnic Institute.

As a scientist, Taleb specializes in studying the influence of unpredictable and random factors on events in economics and history. He successfully combines all the years of his work as a writer and trader scientific approach, rich practical experience and a non-standard view of the situation.

The author is confident that modern economic and mathematical methods, built on rational reasoning and statistical data, do not allow us to see cause-and-effect relationships as they are. On the contrary, such an unambiguous approach distorts knowledge about the world around us and sometimes forces us to make wrong decisions.

“Understanding how to act in conditions of incomplete information is the main and most urgent task of man.”

Besides scientific career Taleb has established himself as a successful trader: in different times He has served in the management of both London and New York brokerage houses, and also traded on the stock exchange, and currently owns his own investment company.

Who will benefit from the book Black Swan?

The book “Black Swan” will be of interest to everyone who is in one way or another connected with mathematics, economics, and philosophy. It will be interesting to read not only for professional stockbrokers and other financial industry workers, but also for those who want to better understand the cause-and-effect relationships of historical events that shock the world with their suddenness.

Taleb talks about how just one minor incident, which no one expected, can turn the lives of millions of people around. The author does not try to put everything into pieces and composea set of rules that absolutely all processes in the surrounding world must obey. His book is not about how to predict the future, but about how to learn to live without knowing what lies ahead.

When Black Swan. Under the Sign of Unpredictability" appeared on the shelves of bookstores; for seventeen weeks it appeared on the bestseller list according to " New York Times". The book was translated into 27 languages and broke all sales records, and an audiobook was also released. Nassim Taleb became famous far beyond Wall Street. The thoughts expressed by the author are far from new, but he gives the reader the opportunity to take a fresh look at what is happening around him, to see the chaos in this ordered world, and to realize the scale of its unpredictability.

When getting acquainted with the work, the reader is conveyed the philosophical and slightly sarcastic mood of the author. Taleb is fluent in the art of allegory; the book contains many colorful metaphors. Of course, it will arouse the greatest interest among risk managers and everyone who in their professional activity faces unpredictable factors. Nassim Taleb managed to see a pattern in chaos, and he shares this knowledge with his readers.

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