Facebook - " Is this anything like a Black Swan? "

                                         THE BLACK SWAN

The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  I read this book last year, found it very interesting - Quite a different viewpoint, but logical.  So obvious, yet why haven't we thought of it before?   Think about it - a turkey goes along day after day enjoying life... getting fed every day at about the same time months and months.  Has everything she wants, ... until that fateful Wednesday.







Wednesday?




The Wednesday before Thanksgiving.






Seemed to be improbable to that turkey.  After all, her entire life was the same day after day, getting fed, being pampered, enjoying the company of other turkeys, speaking gobble-gobble.


Needless to say, that day was a tipping point in her life.  Quite an impact to her, wouldn't you say?   Fooled by randomness.


Quote from a reader's review: This is an entertaining and enlightening book, and fairly easy to read. It has an important message regarding how the world works; that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknownable, the unpredictable -- big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. These are the Black Swans of the title: completedly unexpected and rare events or novel ideas or technologies that have a huge impact on the world. Indeed, Taleb argues that history itself is primarly driven by these Black Swans. 

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