The Black Swan

Tartalom

CONTENTS
Prologue xvli
On the Plumage of Birds xvii
What You Do Not Know xix
Experts and "Empty Suits" xx
Learning to Learn xxi
A New Kind of Ingratitude xxii
Life Is Very Unusual xxiv
Plato and the Nerd xxv
Too Dull to Write About xxvi
The Bottom Line xxvii
Chapters Map xxviii
PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION 1
Chapter 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Sl<eptic 3
Anatomy of a Black Swan 3
On Walking Walks 6
"Paradise" Evaporated The Starred Night History and the Triplet of Opacity Nobody Knows What's Going On History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps
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Dear Diary: On History Running Backward Education in a Taxicab Clusters
Where Is the Showf m Lbs Later
The Four-Letter Word of Independence Limousine Philosopher
Chapter 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan
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Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute 26
The Best (Worst) Advice 26
Beware the Scalable 28
The Advent of Scalability 29
Scalability and Globalization 31
Travels Inside Mediocristan 32
The Strange Country of Extremistan 33
Extremistan and Knowledge 34
Wild and Mild 35
The Tyranny of the Accident 35
Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 38
How to Learn from the Turkey 40
Trained to Be Dull 43
A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge 44
A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem 45
Sextus the (Alas) Empirical 46
Algazel 47
The Skeptic, Friend of Religion 48
/ Don't Want to Be a Turkey 49
They Want to Live in Mediocristan 49
Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonflrmatlon! 51
Zoogles Are Not All Boogies 53
Evidence 55
Negative Empiricism 56
Counting to Three 58
Saw Another Red Mini! 59
CONTENTS xi
Not Everything Back to Mediocristan
Chapter 6: The Narrative Failacy
On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes Sphtting Brains
A Little More Dopamine Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule A Better Way to Die Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past The Madman's Narrative Narrative and Therapy To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision
Dispassionate Science The Sensational and the Black Swan Black Swan Blindness The Pull of the Sensational The Shortcuts
Beware the Brain
How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy
Chapter 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope
Peer Cruelty
Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
Nonlinearities
Process over Results
Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards The Antechamber of Hope Inebriated by Hope The Sweet Trap of Anticipation When You Need the Bastiani Fortress El desierto de los tártaros Bleed or Blowup
Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Lucic: The Problem of Silent Evidence
The Story of the Drowned Worshippers The Cemetery of Letters
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xll CONTENTS
How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps A Health Club for Rats Vicious Bias
More Hidden Applications The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body What You See and What You Don't See Doctors
The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova
"I Am a Risk Taker" I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias The Cosmetic Because
Chapter 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd
Fat Tony
Non-Brooklyn John Lunch at Lake Como
The Uncertainty of the Nerd Gambling with the Wrong Dice Wrapping Up Part One
The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface Distance from Primates
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PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT
From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincare
Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction
On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count 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
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CONTENTS xili
The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets 158
The Character of Prediction Errors I59
Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep 160 Get Another Job
AtJFK 163 Chapter 11: How to Look for Bird Poop
How to Look for Bird Poop 165
Inadvertent Discoveries 166
A Solution Waiting for a Problem 169
Keep Searching 17q
How to Predict Your Predictions! 171
The Nth Billiard Ball I74
Third Republic-Style Decorum 174
The Three Body Problem 176
They Still Ignore Hayek 179
How Not to Be a Nerd 181
Academic Libertarianism 183
Prediction and Free Will 183
The Grueness of Emerald 185
That Great Anticipation Machine 189
Chapter 12: Epistemocracy. a Dream 190
Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat 191
Epistemocracy 192
The Past's Past, and the Past's Future 193
Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness 194
Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies 195
The Melting Ice Cube 196
Once Again, Incomplete Information 197
What They Call Knowledge 198
Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do If You Cannot Predict?
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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
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Barbell Strategy 205
"Nobody Knows Anything" 206
The Great Asymmetry 210
PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN 213
Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Bacl< 215
The World Is Unfair 215
The Matthew Effect 216
Lingua Franca 218
Ideas and Contagions 220
Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan 220
A Brooklyn Frenchman 221
The Long Tail 223
Naive Globalization 225
Reversals Away from Extremistan 227
Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud 229
The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian 229
The Increase in the Decrease 231
The Mandelbrotian 232
What to Remember 234
Inequality 234
Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule 235
Grass and Trees 236
How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe 237
Love of Certainties 239
How to Cause Catastrophes 240
Quételet's Average Monster 240
Golden Mediocrity ¦ 241
God's Error 242
Poincaré to the Rescue 243
Eliminating Unfair Influence 243
"The Greeks Would Have Deified It" 244
"Yes/No" Only Please 244
A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve Comes From
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CONTENTS XV
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: Loclte'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
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xvi CONTENTS
PART FOUR: THE END 293
Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan 295
When Missing a Train Is Painless 297
The End 297
Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans 299
Acl<nowledgments 301
Glossary 307
Notes 311
Bibliography 331
Index 359

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