90 Top Quotes From Black Swan
In Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb explores the impact of highly improbable and unpredictable events that shape the course of history, finance, and everyday life. The term "Black Swan" refers to events that are rare, unforeseen, and carry extreme consequences, often catching society off-guard.
Taleb challenges the conventional wisdom of traditional risk analysis and advocates for a better understanding of uncertainty and randomness. He emphasizes that in a complex and interconnected world, individuals and institutions must be prepared for the unexpected by embracing antifragility, a concept that allows systems to thrive and benefit from chaos and disorder. Through engaging anecdotes and thought-provoking examples, Taleb highlights the limitations of forecasting and the need for resilience in the face of uncertainty.
Black Swan is a captivating exploration of human cognition, decision-making, and the fragility of the systems we rely on. It urges readers to acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge and embrace a more adaptive and robust approach to navigating an increasingly uncertain world. (Black Swan Summary).
Black Swan Quotes
"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking.” (Meaning)
"It has been more profitable for us to bind together in the wrong direction than to be alone in the right one. Those who have followed the assertive idiot rather than the introspective wise person have passed us some of their genes. This is apparent from a social pathology: psychopaths rally followers.”
"Remember that you are a Black Swan.”
"It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.”
"When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.”
"If you hear a ""prominent"" economist using the word 'equilibrium,' or 'normal distribution,' do not argue with him; just ignore him, or try to put a rat down his shirt.”
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you to put there.”
"The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know”
"Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
"We tend to use knowledge as therapy.”
"The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history”
"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries,”
"I will repeat the following until I am hoarse: it is contagion that determines the fate of a theory in social science, not its validity.”
"If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.”
"Prediction, not narration, is the real test of our understanding of the world.”
"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race “looking out for its best interests,” as a politician would say. On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.*”
"If you want to get an idea of a friend's temperament, ethics, and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life.”
"You need a story to displace a story.”
"We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions.”
"The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves."
"This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty.”
"You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk.”
"There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there's nothing to worry about, but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life. It's as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human being come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don't do it, it's as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat."
"The next time someone pesters you with unneeded advice, gently remind him of the fate of the monk whom Ivan the Terrible put to death for delivering uninvited (and moralizing) advice. It works as a short-term cure.”
"We grossly overestimate the length of the effect of misfortune on our lives. You think that the loss of your fortune or current position will be devastating, but you are probably wrong. More likely, you will adapt to anything, as you probably did after past misfortunes.”
"We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.”
"Humans will believe anything you say provided you do not exhibit the smallest shadow of diffidence; like animals, they can detect the smallest crack in your confidence before you express it. The trick is to be as smooth as possible in personal manners. It is much easier to signal self-confidence if you are exceedingly polite and friendly; you can control people without having to offend their sensitivity.”
"It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.”
"When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.”
"A life saved is a statistic; a person hurt is an anecdote. Statistics are invisible; anecdotes are salient.”
"So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist”
"The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.”
"Look into your own existence. Count the significant events, the technological changes, and the inventions that have taken place in our environment since you were born and compare them to what was expected before their advent. How many of them came on a schedule? Look into your own personal life, to your choice of profession, say, or meeting your mate, your exile from your country of origin, the betrayals you faced, your sudden enrichment or impoverishment. How often did these things occur according to plan?”
"One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.”
"Hunger (or episodic energy deficit) strengthens the body and the immune system and helps rejuvenate brain cells, weaken cancer cells , and prevent diabetes.”
"Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan.”
"Living on our planet, today, requires a lot more imagination than we are made to have. We lack imagination and repress it in others.”
"I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event, I just don’t know what that event will be.”
"Evidence shows that we do much less thinking than we believe we do—except, of course, when we think about it.”
"One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” Statistics stay silent in us.”
"Missing a train is only painful if you run after it.”
"We favor the sensational and the extremely visible. This affects the way we judge heroes. There is little room in our consciousness for heroes who do not deliver visible results—or those heroes who focus on process rather than results.”
"The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds.”
"You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative. Ideas come and go, stories stay.”
"History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, the generator of history.”
"History and societies do not crawl. They make jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Yet we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.”
"Just as we tend to underestimate the role of luck in life in general, we tend to it in games of chance.”
"Pasteur said, like all great discoverers, he knew something about accidental discoveries. The best way to get maximal exposure is to keep researching. Collect opportunities--”
"Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event, and without realizing it, .”
"The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”
"It is my great hope someday to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known, namely that our highest currency is respect.”
"If you ever do have to heed a forecast, keep in mind that its accuracy degrades rapidly as you extend it through time.”
"You view the world from a model.”
"So I disagree with the followers of Marx and and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or ""incentives"" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.”
"What is surprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. This is all the more worrisome when we engage in deadly conflicts: wars are fundamentally unpredictable (and we do not know it). Owing to this misunderstanding of the causal chains between policy and actions, we can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance-like a child playing with a chemistry kit.”
"This, perhaps is true self-confidence: the ability to look at the world without the need to find signs that stroke one's ego.”
"It takes considerable effort to see facts (and remember them) while withholding judgment and resisting explanations. And”
"Perhaps the wise one is the one who knows that he cannot see things far away.”
"Popper introduced the mechanism of conjectures and refutations, which works as follows: you formulate a (bold) conjecture and you start looking for the observation that would prove you wrong.”
"It is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it.”
"Beyond our perceptional distortions, there is a problem with logic itself. How can someone have no clue yet be able to hold a set of perfectly sound and coherent viewpoints that match the observations and abide by every single possible rule of logic? Consider that two people can hold incompatible beliefs based on the exact same data. Does this mean that there are possible families of explanations and that each of these can be equally perfect and sound? Certainly not. One may have a million ways to explain things, but the true explanation is unique, whether or not it is within our reach.”
"Mother Nature does not develop Alzheimer’s—actually there is evidence that even humans would not easily lose brain function with age if they followed a regimen of stochastic exercise and stochastic fasting, took long walks, avoided sugar, bread, white rice, and stock market investments, and refrained from taking economics classes or reading such things as The New York Times.”
"We humans are not just a superficial race (this may be curable to some extent); we are a very unfair one.”
"Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the “normal,” particularly with “bell curve” methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.”
"The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Certainly”
"Some business bets in which one wins big but infrequently, yet loses small but frequently, are worth making if others are suckers for them and if you have the personal and intellectual stamina.”
"Organisms need, to use the metaphor of Marcus Aurelius, to turn obstacles into fuel—just as fire does.”
"Randomness in the end is just unknowledge. the world is opaque and appearances fool us”
"Recall the confirmation fallacy: governments are great at telling you what they did, but not what they did not do. In fact, they engage in what could be labeled as phony “philanthropy,” the activity of helping people in a visible and sensational way without taking into account the unseen cemetery of invisible consequences. Bastiat inspired libertarians by attacking the usual arguments that showed the benefits of governments. But his ideas can be generalized to apply to both the Right and the Left.”
"It is much easier to sell “Look what I did for you” than “Look what I avoided for you.”
"Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”
"We have far too many ways to interpret past events for our own good.”
"It is just that narrative can be lethal when used in the wrong places.”
"Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know.”
"Our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This”
"Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much -- but if you do, do not make big scientific claims.”
"We can get closer to the truth by negative instances, not by verification! It”
"We see the obvious and visible consequences, not the invisible and less obvious ones. Yet those unseen consequences.., generally are more meaningful.”
"Assume that you live in a town with two hospitals—one large, the other small. On a given day 60 percent of those born in one of the two hospitals are boys. Which hospital is it likely to be?”
"This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can’t know) is the central idea of uncertainty. Much”
"Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses on the ""normal,"" particularly with ""bell curve"" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its nickname in this book is GIF, Great Intellectual Fraud.”
"American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America’s specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country’s disproportionate share in innovations.”
"I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent one as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, no even a spectrum of possible explanations.”
"Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.”
"Rank beliefs not by their plausibility but by how much harm they might cause”
"Mistaking a naive observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.”
"Luck favors the prepared,” Pasteur said,”
"Our propensity to impose meaning and concepts blocks our awareness of the details making up the concept. However,”
"We do not realize the full extent of the difference between near and far futures. Yet”
"Understanding how to act under conditions of incomplete information is the highest and most urgent human pursuit.”
"We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day”
"A theory is like medicine or government: often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving and, on occasion, lethal. It needs to be used with care, moderation and close adult supervision.”
"The Pyrrhonian skeptics were docile citizens who followed customs and traditions whenever possible, but taught themselves to systematically doubt everything, and thus attain a level of serenity. But while conservative in their habits, they were rabid in their fight against dogma.”
"In practice, randomness is fundamentally incomplete information.”
"I know that history will be dominated by an improbable event, I just don't know what that event will be.”
"We are social animals; hell is other people.”
"We do not spontaneously learn that we don't learn that we don't learn. The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.”
"Know how to rank your beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.”
― Quotes from the book Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Black Swan Author
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a renowned scholar, statistician, and author whose work delves into the intricacies of uncertainty, risk, and randomness in human affairs. Best known for his groundbreaking book "The Black Swan," Taleb challenges conventional wisdom and offers profound insights into how rare and unpredictable events shape our world and have a far more significant impact than we usually anticipate. He advocates for the idea of "antifragility," wherein systems and individuals can not only withstand shocks and volatility but also thrive and improve in the face of adversity. Taleb's rigorous exploration of risk and his critique of over-reliance on standard statistical models have influenced professionals across various fields, from finance to decision-making, prompting them to rethink their assumptions and embrace the inherent uncertainty that surrounds us.
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
