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Index
Cover Other Books by this Author Title Page Dedication Contents Note to the Second Edition 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 One - 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 Two - Yevgenia’s Black Swan Chapter Three - 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 Four - 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 Five - Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
Zoogles Are Not All Boogles Evidence Negative Empiricism
Counting to Three Saw Another Red Mini! Not Everything Back to Mediocristan
Chapter Six - 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 Seven - 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 Eight - 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 Nine - 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 Ten - 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 Eleven - 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 Twelve - 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 Thirteen - 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 Fourteen - 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 Fifteen - 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 Sixteen - 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 Seventeen - 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 Eighteen - 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 Nineteen - 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 Glossary Postscript Essay: On Robustness and Fragility, Deeper Philosophical and Empirical Reflections
I—Learning from Mother Nature, the Oldest and the Wisest
On Slow but Long Walks
My Mistakes
Robustness and Fragility
Redundancy as Insurance Big is Ugly—and Fragile Climate Change and “Too Big” Polluters Species Density The Other Types of Redundancy Distinctions Without a Difference, Differences Without a Distinction
A Society Robust to Error
II—Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile
Another Few Barbells
Beware Manufactured Stability
III—Margaritas Ante Porcos
Main Errors in Understanding the Message
How to Expunge One’s Crimes A Desert Crossing
IV—Asperger and the Ontological Black Swan
Asperger Probability Future Blindness Redux Probability has to be Subjective
Probability on a Thermometer
V—(Perhaps) The Most Useful Problem in the History of Modern Philosophy
Living in Two Dimensions The Dependence on Theory for Rare Events
Epimenides the Cretan An Undecidability Theorem It’s the Consequences … From Reality to Representation Proof in the Flesh
Fallacy of the Single Event Probability
Psychology of Perception of Deviations
The Problem of Induction and Causation in the Complex Domain
Induction Driving the School Bus Blindfolded
VI—The Fourth Quadrant, the Solution to that Most Useful of Problems
David Freedman, RIP Decisions The Fourth Quadrant, a Map
VII—What to Do with the Fourth Quadrant
Not Using the Wrong Map: The Notion of Iatrogenics
Negative Advice Iatrogenics and The Nihilism Label
Phronetic Rules: What is Wise to do (or not do) in Real Life to Mitigate the Fourth Quadrant if you can’t Barbell?
VIII—The Ten Principles for a Black-Swan-Robust Society IX—Amor Fati: How to Become Indestructible
Nihil Perditi
Notes Bibliography Acknowledgments for the First Edition About the Author Copyright
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