Нассим Талеб - The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Black Swan Blindness Redux

Guessing and Predicting

Information Is Bad for Knowledge

The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit

What Moves and What Does Not Move

How to Have the Last Laugh

Events Are Outlandish

Herding Like Cattle

I Was “Almost” Right

Reality? What For?

“Other Than That,” It Was Okay

The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets

The Character of Prediction Errors

Don’t Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep

Get Another Job

At JFK

Chapter 11: How to Look for Bird Poop

How to Look for Bird Poop

Inadvertent Discoveries

A Solution Waiting for a Problem

Keep Searching

How to Predict Your Predictions!

The Nth Billiard Ball

Third Republic–Style Decorum

The Three Body Problem

They Still Ignore Hayek

How Not to Be a Nerd

Academic Libertarianism

Prediction and Free Will

The Grueness of Emerald

That Great Anticipation Machine

Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream

Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat

Epistemocracy

The Past’s Past, and the Past’s Future

Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness

Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies

The Melting Ice Cube

Once Again, Incomplete Information

What They Call Knowledge

Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?

Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap

Being a Fool in the Right Places

Be Prepared

The Idea of Positive Accident

Volatility and Risk of Black Swan

Barbell Strategy

“Nobody Knows Anything”

The Great Asymmetry

PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN

Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back

The World Is Unfair

The Matthew Effect

Lingua Franca

Ideas and Contagions

Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan

A Brooklyn Frenchman

The Long Tail

Naïve Globalization

Reversals Away from Extremistan

Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud

The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian

The Increase in the Decrease

The Mandelbrotian

What to Remember

Inequality

Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule

Grass and Trees

How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe

Love of Certainties

How to Cause Catastrophes

Quételet’s Average Monster

Golden Mediocrity

God’s Error

Poincaré to the Rescue

Eliminating Unfair Influence

“The Greeks Would Have Deified It”

“Yes/No” Only Please

A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve Comes From

Those Comforting Assumptions

“The Ubiquity of the Gaussian”

Chapter 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness

The Poet of Randomness

The Platonicity of Triangles

The Geometry of Nature

Fractality

A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan

Pearls to Swine

The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning)

The Problem of the Upper Bound

Beware the Precision

The Water Puddle Revisited

From Representation to Reality

Once Again, Beware the Forecasters

Once Again, a Happy Solution

Where Is the Gray Swan?

Chapter 17: Locke’s Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places

Only Fifty Years

The Clerks’ Betrayal

Anyone Can Become President

More Horror

Confirmation

It Was Just a Black Swan

How to “Prove” Things

Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony

Ludic Fallacy Redux

Find the Phony

Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society?

The Problem of Practice

How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

Where Is Popper When You Need Him?

The Bishop and the Analyst

Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism

PART FOUR: THE END

Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan

When Missing a Train Is Painless

The End

EPILOGUE: YEVGENIA’S WHITE SWANS

GLOSSARY

POSTSCRIPT ESSAY: ON ROBUSTNESS AND FRAGILITY, DEEPER PHILOSOPHICAL AND EMPIRICAL REFLECTIONS

I—Learning from Mother Nature, the Oldest and the Wisest

On Slow but Long Walks

My Mistakes

Robustness and Fragility

Redundancy as Insurance

Big is Ugly—and Fragile

Climate Change and “Too Big” Polluters

Species Density

The Other Types of Redundancy

Distinctions Without a Difference, Differences Without a Distinction

A Society Robust to Error

II—Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile

Another Few Barbells

Beware Manufactured Stability

III—Margaritas Ante Porcos

Main Errors in Understanding the Message

How to Expunge One’s Crimes

A Desert Crossing

IV—Asperger and the Ontological Black Swan

Asperger Probability

Future Blindness Redux

Probability has to be Subjective

Probability on a Thermometer

V—(Perhaps) the Most Useful Problem in the History of Modern Philosophy

Living in Two Dimensions

The Dependence on Theory for Rare Events

Epimenides the Cretan

An Undecidability Theorem

It’s the Consequences …

From Reality to Representation

Proof in the Flesh

Fallacy of the Single Event Probability

Psychology of Perception of Deviations

The Problem of Induction and Causation in the Complex Domain

Induction

Driving the School Bus Blindfolded

VI—The Fourth Quadrant, the Solution to that Most Useful of Problems

David Freedman, RIP

Decisions

The Fourth Quadrant, a Map

VII—What to Do with the Fourth Quadrant

Not Using the Wrong Map: The Notion of Iatrogenics

Negative Advice

Iatrogenics and The Nihilism Label

Phronetic Rules: What is Wise to do (or not do) in Real Life to Mitigate the Fourth Quadrant if you can’t Barbell?

VIII—The Ten Principles for a Black-Swan-Robust Society

IX—Amor Fati: How to Become Indestructible