Book Review: The Black Swan

Book Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is an interesting book. IIRC Jeff Bezos had his executive team read this book.

This is a book about the unexpected – the Black Swan. Coming out of nowhere.

It describes how underappreciated these types of events are and planning fallacies around them. For example, the turkey extrapolates from its current circumstances that it will be fed and cared for forever – until Thanksgiving.

We can imagine analogous scenarios – like a rock hitting earth, or a volcanic eruption, or nuclear war, or a deadly contagion, the list goes on.

COVID was actually a great thing for us IMO because it was a relatively mild global pandemic. As far as pandemics to break the teeth of a globalized society on – that is a pretty good one.

This is a great book for helping to debug your thinking and offers some contrarian insights. For example, he talks about how more information is often a disadvantage. The mind formulates more possibilities from more random information. I’m not quite sure how to cultivate the “right” amount of information but it’s an interesting perspective.

I think this one is going to need another read and an involved review.