Based on the only we can be certain of - what was happened in our lives in the past - we weave a narrative that makes sense and expect that the future simply must unfold this way. For example, imagine you’re turkey and for years you live on a farm, get to roam free everyday and are fed g...

In Extremistan environments, there can be wild randomness and extreme deviations. Typically, there’re no physical constraints and no known upper/lower limits (e.g. knowledge, financial markets, e-books sales, social media “likes”). Thus, the outliers can make a big difference - i...

For thousands of years, it was widely believed that all swans were white. Then in 1697, a Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Australia, debunking this universal “truth” overnight. The term “Black Swan” has since been used to describe the occurrence of a seemingly impossib...

Black Swans dramatically change the reality of those, who aren’t aware that they’re coming

The author calls an even a “Black Swan” if it’s unpredictable not because it’s random, but because our outlook on what’s possible was too narrow. Imagine you’d known about the 9/11 at...

Taleb identifies 3 key features of Black Swans:

• Rarity: Black Swans are outliers that can’t be reasonably expected to happen based on based past events.
• They have a profound impact on our society/world.
• Retrospective predictability: Although the events are unpredictab...

Black swans are not inconsequential anomalies, but a significant phenomenon that shapes the very world we live in. Many historical events that drastically impacted our societies and lives were actually Black Swan events. These include the 2 world wars, the fall of the Ber...