The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

To slowly distill my single idea, I wanted to become a flâneur, a professional meditator, sit in cafés, lounge, unglued to desks and organization structures, sleep as long as I needed, read voraciously, and not owe any explanation to anybody. I wanted to be left alone in order to build, small steps at a time, an entire system of thought based on my Black Swan idea.

Interestingly, almost all these large corporations were located in the most capitalist country on earth, the United States. The more socialist a country’s orientation, the easier it was for the large corporate monsters to stick around. Why did capitalism (and not socialism) destroy these ogres?

In other words, if you leave companies alone, they tend to get eaten up. Those in favor of economic freedom claim that beastly and greedy corporations pose no threat because competition keeps them in check. What I saw at the Wharton School convinced me that the real reason includes a large share of something else: chance.

But when people discuss chance (which they rarely do), they usually only look at their own luck. The luck of others counts greatly. Another corporation may luck out thanks to a blockbuster product and displace the current winners. Capitalism is, among other things, the revitalization of the world thanks to the opportunity to be lucky. Luck is the grand equalizer, because almost everyone can benefit from it. The socialist governments protected their monsters and, by doing so, killed potential newcomers in the womb

volution is _scalable:__ the DNA that wins (whether by luck or survival advantage) will reproduce itself, like a best-selling book or a successful record, and become pervasive. Other DNA will vanish. Just consider the difference between us humans (excluding financial economists and businessmen) and other living beings on our planet.

If you are an idea person, you do not have to work hard, only think intensely

Categorizing always produces reduction in true complexity

Mother Nature has given us some defense mechanisms: as in Aesop’s fable, one of these is our ability to consider that the grapes we cannot (or did not) reach are sour. But an aggressively stoic prior disdain and rejection of the grapes is even more rewarding. Be aggressive; be the one to resign, if you have the guts.

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.

I am most often irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst—those who exercise their skepticism against religion but not against economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquisition and various religious wars. But they will not show you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don’t go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor’s. But we stop by the offices of many pseudo-scientists and “experts” without alternative. We no longer believe in papal infallibility; we seem to believe in the infallibility of the Nobel, though, as we saw in Chapter 17.

Can someone explain to me why I should care about subatomic particles that, anyway, converge to a Gaussian? People can’t predict how long they will be happy with recently acquired objects, how long their marriages will last, how their new jobs will turn out, yet it’s subatomic particles that they cite as “limits of prediction.” They’re ignoring a mammoth standing in front of them in favor of matter even a microscope would not allow them to see.

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision.