The Black Swan

What have the invention of the wheel, Pompei, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the Internet got in common?

Why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper?

What can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability?

Why are almost all forecasters con-artists?

This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're nearly impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them. A rallying cry to ignore the 'experts', The Black Swan shows us how to stop trying to predict everything and take advantage of uncertainty.

• Prologue
  
• On the Plumage of Birds
• What You Do Not Know
  
• Experts and "Empty Suits"
  
• Learning to Learn
• A New Kind of Ingratitude
• Life Is Very Unusual
• Plato and the Nerd
• Too Dull to Write About
• The Bottom Line
• Chapters Map
• PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION
  
• Chapter 1 : The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic
  
• Anatomy of a Black Swan
• On Walking Walks
  
• "Paradise" Evaporated
  
• The Starred Night
• History and the Triplet of Opacity
• Nobody Knows What's Going On
  
• History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps
  
• Dear Diary: On History Running Backward
  
• Education in a Taxicab
• Clusters
• Where Is the Show?
• 8¾ Lbs Later
• The Four-Letter Word of Independence
  
• Limousine Philosopher
• Chapter 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan
  
• Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute
  
• The Best (Worst) Advice
• Beware the Scalable
• The Advent of Scalability
• Scalability and Globalization
• Travels Inside Mediocristan
• The Strange Country of Extremistan
  
• Extremistan and Knowledge
  
• Wild and Mild
  
• The Tyranny of the Accident
• Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
  
• How to Learn from the Turkey
• Trained to Be Dull
  
• A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge
• A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem
• Sextus the (Alas) Empirical
  
• Algazel
  
• The Skeptic, Friend of Religion
  
• I Don't Want to Be a Turkey
  
• They Want to Live in Mediocristan
• Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
  
• Zoogles Are Not All Boogies
  
• Evidence
• Negative Empiricism
• Counting to Three
  
• Saw Another Red Mini!
  
• Not Everything
• Back to Mediocristan
• Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy
• On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes
• Splitting Brains
• A Little More Dopamine
• Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule
• A Better Way to Die
• Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past
• The Madman's Narrative
• Narrative and Therapy
• To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision
• Dispassionate Science
• The Sensational and the Black Swan
• Black Swan Blindness
• The Pull of the Sensational
• The Shortcuts
• Beware the Brain
• How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy
• Chapter 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope
• Peer Cruelty
• Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
• Nonlinearities
• Process over Results
• Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards
• The Antechamber of Hope
• Inebriated by Hope
• The Sweet Trap of Anticipation
• When You Need the Bastiani Fortress
• El desierto de los tártaros
• Bleed or Blowup
• Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck:
  The Problem of Silent Evidence
• The Story of the Drowned Worshippers
• The Cemetery of Letters
• How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps
• A Health Club for Rats
• Vicious Bias
• More Hidden Applications
• The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body
• What You See and What You Don't See
• Doctors
• The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova
• "I Am a Risk Taker"
• I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias
• The Cosmetic Because
• Chapter 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd
• Fat Tony
• Non-Brooklyn John
• Lunch at Lake Como
• The Uncertainty of the Nerd
• Gambling with the Wrong Dice
• Wrapping Up Part One
• The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface
• Distance from Primates
• PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT
  From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré
  
• Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction
• On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count
• Black Swan Blindness Redux
• Guessing and Predicting
• Information Is Bad for Knowledge
• The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit
• What Moves and What Does Not Move
• How to Have the Last Laugh
• Events Are Outlandish
• Herding Like Cattle
• I Was "Almost" Right
• Reality? What For?
• "Other Than That," It Was Okay
• The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets
  
• The Character of Prediction Errors
• Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep
• Get Another Job
  
• At JFK
• Chapter 11 : How to Look for Bird Poop
  
• How to Look for Bird Poop
• Inadvertent Discoveries
  
• A Solution Waiting for a Problem
  
• Keep Searching
• How to Predict Your Predictions!
• The Nth Billiard Ball
• Third Republic-Style Decorum
  
• The Three Body Problem
  
• They Still Ignore Hayek
  
• How Not to Be a Nerd
  
• Academic Libertarianism
  
• Prediction and Free Will
• The Grueness of Emerald
• That Great Anticipation Machine
• Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream
  
• Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat
  
• Epistemocracy
• The Past's Past, and the Past's Future
• Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness
  
• Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies
  
• The Melting Ice Cube
  
• Once Again, Incomplete Information
  
• What They Call Knowledge
• Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?
• Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap
• Being a Fool in the Right Places
  
• Be Prepared
• The Idea of Positive Accident
• Volatility and Risk of Black Swan
  
• Barbell Strategy
• "Nobody Knows Anything"
• The Great Asymmetry
• PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
• Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back
• The World Is Unfair
• The Matthew Effect
• Lingua Franca
• Ideas and Contagions
• Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan
• A Brooklyn Frenchman
• The Long Tail
• Naïve Globalization
• Reversals Away from Extremistan
• Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud
• The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian
• The Increase in the Decrease
• The Mandelbrotian
• What to Remember
• Inequality
• Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule
• Grass and Trees
• How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe
• Love of Certainties
• How to Cause Catastrophes
• Quételet's Average Monster
• Golden Mediocrity
• God's Error
• Poincaré to the Rescue
• Eliminating Unfair Influence
• "The Greeks Would Have Deified It"
• "Yes/No" Only Please
• A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell Curve Comes From
• Those Comforting Assumptions
  
• "The Ubiquity of the Gaussian"
• Chapter 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness
  
• The Poet of Randomness
• The Platonicity of Triangles
• The Geometry of Nature
  
• Fractality
  
• A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan
  
• Pearls to Swine
• The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning)
• The Problem of the Upper Bound
  
• Beware the Precision
  
• The Water Puddle Revisited
  
• From Representation to Reality
• Once Again, Beware the Forecasters
• Once Again, a Happy Solution
  
• Where Is the Gray Swan?
• Chapter 17: Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places
  
• Only Fifty Years
  
• The Clerks' Betrayal
  
• Anyone Can Become President
  
• More Horror
  
• Confirmation
• It Was Just a Black Swan
• How to "Prove" Things
  
• Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony
  
• Ludic Fallacy Redux
• Find the Phony
  
• Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society?
  
• The Problem of Practice
• How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?
• Where Is Popper When You Need Him?
  
• The Bishop and the Analyst
  
• Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism
• PART FOUR: THE END
• Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan
  
• When Missing a Train Is Painless
• The End
• Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans
  

Except for a small part about Bell-curves, this book is just incoherent ramblings, where we are supposed to believe we're listening to one of the smartest people around…

His first book (Fooled By Randomness) was excellent, but this feels like a sequel too far. Avoid it, you wont miss a thing.