The Black Swan

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE FIRST EDITION

  I derived an unexpected amount of enjoyment in writing this book—in fact, it just wrote itself—and I want the reader to experience the same. I would like to thank the following friends.

  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 No vember 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 Zur
iff 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. I also thank Linda Eckstein and Justin Fox (for the market graph), as well as Paul Kaju, Martin Pomp, and Lea Beresford.

  I received helpful comments from the voracious intellectual Paul Solman (who went through the manuscript with a microscope). I owe a lot to Phil Rosenczweig, Avishai Margalit, Peter Forbes, Michael Schrage, Driss Ben Brahim, Vinay Pande, Antony Van Couvering, Nicholas Vardy, Brian Hinchcliffe, Aaron Brown, Espen Haug, Neil Chriss, Zvika Afik, Shaiy Pilpel, Paul Kedrosky, Reid Bernstein, Claudia Schmid, Jay Leonard, Shellwyn Weston, Tony Glickman, Paul Johnson, Chidem Kurdas (and the NYU Austrian economists), Charles Babbitt, plus so many anonymous persons I have forgotten about* …

  Ralph Gomory and Jesse Ausubel of the Sloan Foundation run a research funding program called the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable. They offered their moral and financial help for the promotion of my ideas—I took the invaluable moral option. I also thank my business partners, coauthors, and intellectual associates: Espen Haug, Mark Spitznagel, Benoît Mandelbrot, Tom Witz, Paul Wilmott, Avital Pilpel, and Emanuel Derman. I also thank John Brockman and Katinka Matson for making this book possible, and Max Brockman for his comments on the draft. I thank Cindy, Sarah, and Alexander for their tolerance. In addition, Alexander helped with the graphs and Sarah worked on the bibliography. Mark Fandetti, Mark Horowitz, Bruce Waxman, Spiros Makridakis, Jack Schwagger, and Elie Ayache helped with the more technical typos. The readers Jonathan Skinner, Harry Thayer, and David Evans helped correct technical and factual mistakes. I thank Linda Eckstein and Justin Fox for suggesting to Mandelbrot and me the graph of the SP500.

  I tried to give my editor, Will Murphy, the impression of being an unbearably stubborn author, only to discover that I was fortunate that he was an equally stubborn editor (but good at hiding it). He protected me from the intrusions of the standardizing editors. They have an uncanny ability to inflict maximal damage by breaking the internal rhythm of one’s prose with the minimum of changes. Will M. is also the right kind of party animal. I was also flattered that Daniel Menaker took the time to edit my text. I also thank Janet Wygal and Steven Meyers. The staff at Random House was accommodating—but they never got used to my phone pranks (like my trying to pass for Bernard-Henri Lévy). One of the highlights of my writing career was a long lunch with William Goodlad, my editor at Penguin, and Stefan McGrath, the managing director of the group. I suddenly realized that I could not separate the storyteller in me from the scientific thinker; as a matter of fact, the story came first to my mind, rather than as an after-the-fact illustration of the concept.