The cover of The Black Swan

The Black Swan

The Impact of the Highly Improbable

by Nassim Taleb

I have a love-hate relationship with Taleb. His writing is dripping with ego. The book might as well be called I Was Right, since that’s the subject most of the time. But I have to hand it to Taleb, the way he tends to be right about things is interesting. I really resonate with the sentiment that people tend to take shortcuts and overlook data when the goal is certainty. Particularly this quote:

The more information you give someone, the more hypotheses they will formulate along the way, and the worse off they will be. They see more random noise and mistake it for information.