The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues that rare, unpredictable events dominate history while our minds compulsively construct false certainty from insufficient evidence. From the Thousand-Day Turkey—whose confidence peaks the morning before slaughter—to Captain Edward Smith's forty uneventful years before commanding the Titanic, Taleb maps the architecture of human blindness. His distinction between Mediocristan (where bell curves work) and Extremistan (where Bill Gates's wealth dwarfs a thousand random people) explains why October 19, 1987 happened on a Monday when models said it shouldn't occur for billions of years.

You'll learn:

- Why Umberto Eco's thirty thousand unread books matter more than read ones

- How the narrative fallacy made Bloomberg explain opposite market moves within thirty minutes

- What "f*** you money" has to do with intellectual independence