QUICKLET ON NASSIM TALEB'S THE BLACK SWAN (CLIFFNOTES-LIKE BOOK SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS) EBOOK (edición en inglés)

ABOUT THE BOOK The first edition of Nassim Nicholas Talebs second mainstream work, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, was published by Random House in April of 2007. In this book Taleb says many, many things; he warns against the dangers of ignoring outliers and trusting experts; he gives advice on how to position oneself to take advantage of the unexpected; he creates a fictional narrative about an authors rise to literary stardom; and he draws upon the work of some of his favorite (as well as his most despised) thinkers in the fields of philosophy, mathematics, and psychology. But the thing about The Black Swan that is most likely to grab the contemporary readers attention is its apparent prediction of the financial collapse that occurred only a few months after its publication. Though Taleb argues against the validity of economic forecasts, he makes some eerily specific critiques of the banking industry, “just months before the subprime fiasco rocked global markets and led banks to announce at least $208 billion worth of writedowns,” according to Bloomberg News. Any criticisms of The Black Swan seem to fade given the uncanny timing of its release. In the wake of the financial crisis, while other economists cringed at their lack of foresight, Taleb was hailed as a prophet. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK While we might prefer to believe that the world operates in a linear fashion, Taleb assures us this is not so. Says Taleb, “[N]onlinear relationships are ubiquitous in life. Linear relationships are truly the exception; we focus on them in classrooms and textbooks because they are easier to understand (89).” Chapter Eight Giacomo Casanovas Unfailing Luck In Chapter Eight, Taleb introduces the concept of silent evidence. Like the antilibrary, silent evidence emphasizes what is not known over what is. Essentially, silent evidence are those instances which do not produce a Black Swan and thus do not receive acknowledgement.