The Black Swan
Page 58
Part Three of this book inspired my class lectures at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I thank Dean Tom O’Brien for his support and encouragement. He loved to see me shake up indoctrinated Ph.D. students. I also thank my second home, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University, for allowing me to lecture for three quarters of a decade.
It is unfortunate that one learns most from people one disagrees with—something Montaigne encouraged half a millennium ago but is rarely practiced. I discovered that it puts your arguments through robust seasoning since you know that these people will identify the slightest crack—and you get information about the limits of their theories as well as the weaknesses of your own. I tried to be more graceful with my detractors than with my friends—particularly those who were (and stayed) civilized. So, over my career, I learned a few tricks from a series of public debates, correspondence, and discussions with Robert C. Merton, Steve Ross, Myron Scholes, Philippe Jorion, and dozens of others (though, aside from Elie Ayache’s critique, the last time I heard something remotely new against my ideas was in 1994). These debates were valuable since I was looking for the extent of the counterarguments to my Black Swan idea and trying to figure out how my detractors think—or what they did not think about. Over the years I have ended up reading more material from those I disagree with than from those whose opinion I share—I read more Samuelson than Hayek, more Merton (the younger) than Merton (the elder), more Hegel than Montaigne, and more Descartes than Sextus. It is the duty of every author to represent the ideas of his adversaries as faithfully as possible.
My greatest accomplishment in life is to have managed to befriend people, such as Elie Ayache and Jim Gatheral, in spite of some intellectual disagreements.
Most of this book was written during a peripatetic period when I freed myself of (almost) all business obligations, routines, and pressures, and went on meditative urban walks in a variety of cities where I gave a series of lectures on the Black Swan idea.* I wrote it largely in cafés—my preference has always been for dilapidated (but elegant) cafés in regular neighborhoods, as unpolluted with persons of commerce as possible. I also spent much time in Heathrow Terminal 4, absorbed in my writing to the point that I forgot about my allergy to the presence of strained businessmen around me.
* I lost his business card, but would like to warmly thank a scientist traveling to Vienna aboard British Airways flight 700 on December 11, 2003, for suggesting the billiard ball illustration in Chapter 11. All I know about him is that he was fifty-two, gray-haired, English-born, wrote poetry on yellow notepads, and was traveling with seven suitcases since he was moving in with his thirty-five-year-old Viennese girlfriend.
* It is impossible to go very deep into an idea when you run a business, no matter the number of hours the occupation entails—simply put, unless you are insensitive, the worries and feelings of responsibility occupy precious cognitive space. You may be able to study, meditate, and write if you are an employee, but not when you own a business—unless you are of an irresponsible nature. I thank my partner, Mark Spitznagel, for allowing me—thanks to the clarity of his mind and his highly systematic, highly disciplined, and well engineered approach—to gain exposure to high-impact rare events without my having to get directly involved in business activities.
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge, and he has led three high-profile careers around his ideas, as a man of letters, as a businessman-trader, and as a university professor. Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and a principal of Universa LP. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-one languages.
2010 Random House Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2007, 2010 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2007.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Taleb, Nassim.
The black swan: the impact of the highly improbable /
Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
p. cm.
Contents: Part one—Umberto Eco’s antilibrary, or how we seek
validation—Part two—We just can’t predict—Part three—
Those gray swans of extremistan—Part four—The end.
eISBN: 978-0-679-60418-1
1. Uncertainty (Information theory)—Social aspects.
2. Forecasting. I. Title.
Q375.T35 2007
003′.54—dc22 2006051093
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