The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

My friend and adviser Rolf Dobelli, the novelist, entrepreneur, and voracious reader, kept up with the various versions of this text. I also built up a large debt toward Peter Bevelin, an erudite and pure “thinking doer” with extreme curiosity who spends his waking hours chasing ideas and spotting the papers I am usually looking for; he scrutinized the text. Yechezkel Zilber, a Jerusalem-based idea-starved autodidact who sees the world ab ovo, from the egg, asked very tough questions, to the point of making me ashamed of the formal education I received and uncomfortable for not being a true autodidact like him—it is thanks to no-nonsense people that I am grounding my Black Swan idea in academic libertarianism. The scholar Philip Tetlock, who knows more about prediction than anyone since the Delphic times, went through the manuscript and scrutinized my arguments. Phil is so valuable and thorough that he was even more informational with the absence of comments than he was with his comments. I owe a big debt to Danny Kahneman who, in addition to the long conversations on my topics of human nature (and noting with horror that I remembered almost every comment), put me in contact with Phil Tetlock. I thank Maya Bar Hillel for inviting me to address the Society of Judgment and Decision Making at their annual meeting in Toronto in November 2005—thanks to the generosity of the researchers there, and the stimulating discussions, I came back having taken away far more than I gave. Robert Shiller asked me to purge some “irreverent” comments, but the fact that he criticized the aggressiveness of the delivery, but not the content, was quite informational. Mariagiovanna Muso was the first to become conscious of the Black Swan effect on the arts and sent me along the right lines of research in sociology and anthropology. I had long discussions with the literary scholar Mihai Spariosu on Plato, Balzac, ecological intelligence, and cafés in Bucharest. Didier Sornette, always a phone call away, kept e-mailing me papers on various unadvertised, but highly relevant, subjects in statistical physics. Jean-Philippe Bouchaud offered a great deal of help on the problems associated with the statistics of large deviations. Michael Allen wrote a monograph for writers looking to get published, based on the ideas of Chapter 8—I subsequently rewrote Chapter 8 through the eyes of a writer looking at his lot in life. Mark Blyth was always helpful as a sounding board, reader, and adviser. My friends at the DoD, Andy Marshall and Andrew Mays, supplied me with ideas and questions. Paul Solman, a voracious mind, went through the manuscript with severe scrutiny. I owe the term Extremistan to Chris Anderson, who found my earlier designation too bookish. Nigel Harvey guided me through the literature on forecasting.

I plied the following scientists with questions: Terry Burnham, Robert Trivers, Robyn Dawes, Peter Ayton, Scott Atran, Dan Goldstein, Alexander Reisz, Art De Vany, Raphael Douady, Piotr Zielonka, Gur Huberman, Elkhonon Goldberg, and Dan Sperber. Ed Thorp, the true living owner of the “Black-Scholes formula” was helpful; I realized, speaking to him, that economists ignore intellectual productions outside their club—regardless how valuable. Lorenzo Perilli was extremely generous with his comments about Menodotus and helped correct a few errors. Duncan Watts allowed me to present the third part of this book at a Columbia University seminar in sociology and collect all manner of comments. David Cowan supplied the graph in the Poincaré discussion, making mine pale by comparison. I also benefited from James Montier’s wonderful brief pieces on human nature. Bruno Dupire, as always, provides the best walking conversations.

It does not pay to be the loyal friend of a pushy author too close to his manuscript. Marie-Christine Riachi was given the thankless task of reading chapters in inverse order; I only gave her the incomplete pieces and, of those, only the ones (then) patently lacking in clarity. Jamil Baz received the full text every time but chose to read it backwards. Laurence Zuriff read and commented on every chapter. Philip Halperin, who knows more about risk management than anyone (still) alive, offered wonderful comments and observations. Other victims: Cyrus Pirasteh, Bernard Oppetit, Pascal Boulard, Guy Riviere, Joelle Weiss, Didier Javice, Andreea Munteanu, Andrei Pokrovsky, Philippe Asseily, Farid Karkaby, George Nasr, Alina Stefan, George Martin, Stan Jonas, and Flavia Cymbalista.