The Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable Events (Book Review Sample)

The Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable Events
In “The Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable Events”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains that in reconsideration, people prefer to find simple explanations for unexpected occurrences; this phenomenon is referred to as "retrospect distortion" or "the Black Swan." The Black Swan theory, as defined by Nassim, is a hypothesis that a catastrophic event will occur. One of the most unlikely events that may occur has three primary characteristics: it is unexpected; it has a significant ramification; and, after it has occurred, we devise an explanation that makes it seem less random and more predictable than it was. The extraordinary success of Google, as well as the events of September 11th, were both black swan events. From religious movements to events in our own lives, according to the author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans are at the heart of virtually everything that happens in our world.
Why do we wait till after a black swan event occurs before acknowledging that it has occurred? According to Taleb, part of the explanation lies in the fact that people are predisposed to absorb details when they should be concentrating on broad concepts. He explains that people spend much of their time concentrating on what they already know, and we consistently fail to consider what they don't know. As a result, people are unable to accurately assess possibilities, are too susceptible to the temptation to simplify, narrate, and classify incidents, and are not sufficiently open to rewarding individuals who can conceive the impossible. Although the Black Swan Theory is much more complicated than we can conceive, five basic themes can be traced back to the Black Swan Effect that we may consider.
According to Nassim, people tend to concentrate on pre-selected parts of the visible and extrapolate this to the unseen, resulting in inaccuracy in confirmation of the seen. Second, people deceive themselves by telling tales that satisfy their platonic desires for unique patterns, which is known as the narrative fallacy. Third, the author, asserts that human nature is not predisposed to the occurrence of the Black Swan effect; in fact, he thinks that people are incapable of comprehending, to a certain degree, an event that occurs without an explanation. Then, the idea of distortion of silent evidence holds that what we perceive is not always the whole of what is there. Finally, we tunnel or narrow our attention on a small number of well-defined sources of uncertainty to the point that other infrequent unexpected occurrences are no longer readily apparent. In a word, this book is about people's blindness to the unpredictability of their lives. They will never be able to foresee or prevent events from taking place. They are always on the lookout for explanations, but the reality is that we are very arrogant about what they believe we know. People indeed know a great deal, but they tend to overcompensate our capacity to comprehend and process events.