Black Swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
110 people recommended it in 46 threads, 2007–2026.
14 commenters pushed back on it — worth reading the threads.
What people on Hacker News said
One of the central arguments of the book is that people have been using tools from Mediocristan in Extremistan and that's what leads to these Black Swan phenomen, which in turn might have potentially ruinous effects.
All said and done I feel like it's made me look at and evaluate a lot more possibilities at all important junctions in my life (if not all junctions).
The role of chance in everyday life! It plays a big role!
Nevertheless, it behooves us to try to remember that we are susceptible to the "Black Swan effect", the very real tendency to immediately forget that our sacred cows shit the bed.
Incerto 5-Book Set (Black Swan and Antifragile included) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: how to understand and win in life, literally.
Fooled by Randomness has lots of good analysis of survivorship bias, trend following and other mistaken pattern matching strategies that are hard wired into us, and blind us to the true nature of events.
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