The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Manuscripts and the Phoenicians:for survival and science, see cisne (2005). note that the article takes into account physical survival (like fossil), not cultural, which implies a selection bias. Courtesy Peter Bevelin.

Stigler’s law of eponymy:stigler (2002).

French book statistics:Lire, April 2005.

Why dispersion matters:more technically, the distribution of the extremum (i.e., the maximum or minimum) of a random variable depends more on the variance of the process than on its mean. Someone whose weight tends to fluctuate a lot is more likely to show you a picture of himself very thin than someone else whose weight is on average lower but remains constant. The mean (read skills) sometimes plays a very, very small role.

Fossil record: Ithank the reader Frederick Colbourne for his comments on this subject. The literature calls it the “pull of the recent,” but has difficulty estimating the effects, owing to disagreements. See Jablonski et al. (2003).

Undiscovered public knowledge:here is another manifestation of silent evidence: you can actually do lab work sitting in an armchair, just by linking bits and pieces of research by people who labor apart from one another and miss on connections. Using bibliographic analysis, it is possible to find links between published information that had not been known previously by researchers. I “discovered” the vindication of the armchair in Fuller (2005). For other interesting discoveries, see Spasser (1997) and Swanson (1986a, 1986b, 1987).

Crime: The définition of economic “crime” is something that comes in hindsight. Regulations, once enacted, do not run retrospectively, so many activities causing excess are never sanctioned (e.g., bribery).

Bastiat:see Bastiat (1862-1864).

Casanova:i thank the reader Milo Jones for pointing out to me the exact number of volumes. See Masters (1969).

Reference point problem:taking into account background information requires a form of thinking in conditional terms that, oddly, many scientists (especially the better ones) are incapable of handling. The difference between the two odds is called, simply, conditional probability. We are computing the probability of surviving conditional on our being in the sample itself. Simply put, you cannot compute probabilities if your survival is part of the condition of the realization of the process.

Plagues:see McNeill (1976).

CHAPTER 9

Intelligence and Nobel:simonton (1999). if iq scores correlate, they do so very weakly with subsequent success.

“Uncertainty”:knight (1923). my definition of such risk (taleb, 2007c) is that it is a normative situation, where we can be certain about probabilities, i.e., no metaproba-bilities. Whereas, if randomness and risk result from epistemic opacity, the difficulty in seeing causes, then necessarily the distinction is bunk. Any reader of Cicero would recognize it as his probability; see epistemic opacity in his De Divinatione, Liber primus, LVI, 127:

Qui enim teneat causas rerum futurarum, idem necesse est omnia teneat quae futura sint. Quod cum nemo facere nisi deus possit, relinquendum est homini, ut signis quibusdam consequentia declarantibus futura prae-sentiat.

“He who knows the causes will understand the future, except that, given that nobody outside God possesses such faculty …” Philosophy and epistemology of probability:laplace. Treatise, Keynes (1920), de Finetti

(1931), Kyburg (1983), Levi (1970), Ayer, Hacking (1990, 2001), Gillies (2000), von

Mises (1928), von Plato (1994), Carnap (1950), Cohen (1989), Popper (1971),

Eatwell et al. (1987), and Gigerenzer et al. (1989). History of statistical knowledge and methods:i found no intelligent work in the history

of statistics, i.e., one that does not fall prey to the ludic fallacy or Gaussianism. For a

conventional account, see Bernstein (1996) and David (1962). General books on probability and information theory:cover and Thomas (1991); less

technical but excellent, Bayer (2003). For a probabilistic view of information theory:

the posthumous Jaynes (2003) is the only mathematical book other than de Finetti’s

work that I can recommend to the general reader, owing to his Bayesian approach

and his allergy for the formalism of the idiot savant. Poker: Itescapes the ludic fallacy; see taleb (2006a). Plato’s normative approach to left and right hands:see mcmanus (2002). Nietzsche’s bildungsphilister:see van tongeren (2002) and Hicks and Rosenberg (2003).

Note that because of the confirmation bias academics will tell you that intellectuals