R: The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb

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Innovation is the result of luck (positive black swans)

I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 10). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Change metaphors slightly and imagine that your consciousness is a desk in the Library of Congress: no matter how many books the library holds, and makes available for retrieval, the size of your desk sets some processing limitations. Compression is vital to the performance of conscious work. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 68). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Now consider the opposite: a book filled with the repetition of the following sentence: “The chairman of [insert here your company name] is a lucky fellow who happened to be in the right place at the right time and claims credit for the company’s success, without making a single allowance for luck,” running ten times per page for 500 pages. The entire book can be accurately compressed, as I have just done, into 34 words (out of 100,000); you could reproduce it with total fidelity out of such a kernel. By finding the pattern, the logic of the series, you no longer need to memorize it all. You just store the pattern. And, as we can see here, a pattern is obviously more compact than raw information. You looked into the book and found a rule. It is along these lines that the great probabilist Andrey Nikolayevich Kolmogorov defined the degree of randomness; it is called “Kolmogorov complexity.” We, members of the human variety of primates, have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our heads. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize, the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same condition that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is less random than it actually is. And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 68-69). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 70). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance. So we pull memories along causative lines, revising them involuntarily and unconsciously. We continuously renarrate past events in the light of what appears to make what we think of as logical sense after these events occur. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 71). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Likewise, if I asked you how many cases of lung cancer are likely to take place in the country, you would supply some number, say half a million. Now, if instead I asked you how many cases of lung cancer are likely to take place because of smoking, odds are that you would give me a much higher number (I would guess more than twice as high). Adding the because makes these matters far more plausible, and far more likely. Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all. I return to the example of E. M. Forster’s plot from earlier in this chapter, but seen from the standpoint of probability. Which of these two statements seems more likely? Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife. Joey seemed happily married. He killed his wife to get her inheritance. Clearly the second statement seems more likely at first blush, which is a pure mistake of logic, since the first, being broader, can accommodate more causes, such as he killed his wife because he went mad, because she cheated with both the postman and the ski instructor, because he entered a state of delusion and mistook her for a financial forecaster. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 76). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Respect for elders in many societies might be a kind of compensation for our short-term memory. The word senate comes from senatus, “aged” in Latin; sheikh in Arabic means both a member of the ruling elite and “elder.” Elders are repositories of complicated inductive learning that includes information about rare events. Elders can scare us with stories—which is why we become overexcited when we think of a specific Black Swan. I was excited to find out that this also holds true in the animal kingdom: a paper in Science showed that elephant matriarchs play the role of superadvisers on rare events.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 78). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

System 1, the experiential one, is effortless, automatic, fast, opaque (we do not know that we are using it), parallel-processed, and can lend itself to errors. It is what we call “intuition,” and performs these quick acts of prowess that became popular under the name blink, after the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book. System 1 is highly emotional, precisely because it is quick. It produces shortcuts, called “heuristics,” that allow us to function rapidly and effectively. Dan Goldstein calls these heuristics “fast and frugal.” Others prefer to call them “quick and dirty.” Now, these shortcuts are certainly virtuous, since they are rapid, but, at times, they can lead us into some severe mistakes. This main idea generated an entire school of research called the heuristics and biases approach (heuristics corresponds to the study of shortcuts, biases stand for mistakes).

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 81). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

System 2, the cogitative one, is what we normally call thinking. It is what you use in a classroom, as it is effortful (even for Frenchmen), reasoned, slow, logical, serial, progressive, and self-aware (you can follow the steps in your reasoning). It makes fewer mistakes than the experiential system, and, since you know how you derived your result, you can retrace your steps and correct them in an adaptive manner. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 81-82). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Most of our mistakes in reasoning come from using System 1 when we are in fact thinking that we are using System 2. How? Since we react without thinking and introspection, the main property of System 1 is our lack of awareness of using it! Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 82). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Much of the trouble with human nature resides in our inability to use much of System 2, or to use it in a prolonged way without having to take a long beach vacation. In addition, we often just forget to use it. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 82). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 84). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Finally, there may be a way to use a narrative—but for a good purpose. Only a diamond can cut a diamond; we can use our ability to convince with a story that conveys the right message—what storytellers seem to do. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 84). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Our intuitions are not cut out for nonlinearities. Consider our life in a primitive environment where process and result are closely connected. You are thirsty; drinking brings you adequate satisfaction. Or even in a not-so-primitive environment, when you engage in building, say, a bridge or a stone house, more work will lead to more apparent results, so your mood is propped up by visible continuous feedback. In a primitive environment, the relevant is the sensational. This applies to our knowledge. When we try to collect information about the world around us, we tend to be guided by our biology, and our attention flows effortlessly toward the sensational—not the relevant so much as the sensational. Somehow the guidance system has gone wrong in the process of our coevolution with our habitat—it was transplanted into a world in which the relevant is often boring, nonsensational. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 87-88). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 101). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

(Anyone can be skeptical; any scientist can be overly empirical—it is the rigor coming from the combination of skepticism and empiricism that’s hard to come by.) Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 102). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 103). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.fn1 The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 105). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

There is a vicious attribute to the bias: it can hide best when its impact is largest. Owing to the invisibility of the dead rats, the more lethal the risks, the less visible they will be, since the severely victimized are likely to be eliminated from the evidence. The more injurious the treatment, the larger the difference between the surviving rats and the rest, and the more fooled you will be about the strengthening effect.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 108). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

In his essay “What We See and What We Don’t See,” Bastiat offered the following idea: we can see what governments do, and therefore sing their praises—but we do not see the alternative. But there is an alternative; it is less obvious and remains unseen. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 111). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Bastiat goes a bit deeper. If both the positive and the negative consequences of action fell on its author, our learning would be fast. But often an action’s positive consequences benefit only its author, since they are visible, while the negative consequences, being invisible, apply to others, with a net cost to society. Consider job-protection measures: you notice those whose jobs are made safe and ascribe social benefits to such protections. You do not notice the effect on those who cannot find a job as a result, since the measure will reduce job openings. In some cases, as with the cancer patients who may be punished by Katrina, the positive consequences of an action will immediately benefit the politicians and phony humanitarians, while the negative ones take a long time to appear—they may never become noticeable.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 111). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Let us apply this reasoning to September 11, 2001. Around twenty-five hundred people were directly killed by bin Laden’s group in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Their families benefited from the support of all manner of agencies and charities, as they should. But, according to researchers, during the remaining three months of the year, close to one thousand people died as silent victims of the terrorists. How? Those who were afraid of flying and switched to driving ran an increased risk of death. There was evidence of an increase of casualties on the road during that period; the road is considerably more lethal than the skies. These families got no support—they did not even know that their loved ones were also the victims of bin Laden. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 111-112). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

But I insist on the following: that we got here by accident does not mean that we should continue to take the same risks. We are mature enough a race to realize this point, enjoy our blessings, and try to preserve, by becoming more conservative, what we got by luck. We have been playing Russian roulette; now let’s stop and get a real job.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 116). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

First, justification of overoptimism on grounds that “it brought us here” arises from a far more serious mistake about human nature: the belief that we are built to understand nature and our own nature and that our decisions are, and have been, the result of our own choices. I beg to disagree. So many instincts drive us. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 116-117). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The reference point argument is as follows: do not compute odds from the vantage point of the winning gambler (or the lucky Casanova, or the endlessly bouncing back New York City, or the invincible Carthage), but from all those who started in the cohort. Consider once again the example of the gambler. If you look at the population of beginning gamblers taken as a whole, you can be close to certain that one of them (but you do not know in advance which one) will show stellar results just by luck. So, from the reference point of the beginning cohort, this is not a big deal. But from the reference point of the winner (and, who does not, and this is key, take the losers into account), a long string of wins will appear to be too extraordinary an occurrence to be explained by luck. Note that a “history” is just a series of numbers through time. The numbers can represent degrees of wealth, fitness, weight, anything.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 119). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Whenever your survival is in play, don’t immediately look for causes and effects. The main identifiable reason for our survival of such diseases might simply be inaccessible to us: we are here since, Casanova-style, the “rosy” scenario played out, and if it seems too hard to understand it is because we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 120). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

We love the tangible, the confirmation, the palpable, the real, the visible, the concrete, the known, the seen, the vivid, the visual, the social, the embedded, the emotionally laden, the salient, the stereotypical, the moving, the theatrical, the romanced, the cosmetic, the official, the scholarly-sounding verbiage (b**t), the pompous Gaussian economist, the mathematicized crap, the pomp, the Académie Française, Harvard Business School, the Nobel Prize, dark business suits with white shirts and Ferragamo ties, the moving discourse, and the lurid. Most of all we favor the narrated. Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters—we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial—and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 132). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant from the animal as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs. Train your reasoning abilities to control your decisions; nudge System 1 (the heuristic or experiential system) out of the important ones. Train yourself to spot the difference between the sensational and the empirical. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid “tunneling.” Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 133). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Epistemic arrogance bears a double effect: we overestimate what we know, and underestimate uncertainty, by compressing the range of possible uncertain states (i.e., by reducing the space of the unknown). Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 140). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Show two groups of people a blurry image of a fire hydrant, blurry enough for them not to recognize what it is. For one group, increase the resolution slowly, in ten steps. For the second, do it faster, in five steps. Stop at a point where both groups have been presented an identical image and ask each of them to identify what they see. The members of the group that saw fewer intermediate steps are likely to recognize the hydrant much faster. Moral? 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. The problem is that our ideas are sticky: once we produce a theory, we are not likely to change our minds—so those who delay developing their theories are better off. When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate. Two mechanisms are at play here: the confirmation bias that we saw in Chapter 5, and belief perseverance, the tendency not to reverse opinions you already have. Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to part with them.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 144). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

He links it to self-deception. In fields where we have ancestral traditions, such as pillaging, we are very good at predicting outcomes by gauging the balance of power. Humans and chimps can immediately sense which side has the upper hand, and make a cost-benefit analysis about whether to attack and take the goods and the mates. Once you start raiding, you put yourself into a delusional mind-set that makes you ignore additional information—it is best to avoid wavering during battle. On the other hand, unlike raids, large-scale wars are not something present in human heritage—we are new to them—so we tend to misestimate their duration and overestimate our relative power.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 147). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The classical model of discovery is as follows: you search for what you know (say, a new way to reach India) and find something you didn’t know was there (America). If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity. The term serendipity was coined in a letter by the writer Hugh Walpole, who derived it from a fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip.” These princes “were always making discoveries by accident or sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 166-167). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

This was my first encounter with a firm that lived off Black Swans of the positive kind. I was told that a scientist managed the company and that he had the instinct, as a scientist, to just let scientists look wherever their instinct took them. Commercialization came later. My hosts, scientists at heart, understood that research involves a large element of serendipity, which can pay off big as long as one knows how serendipitous the business can be and structures it around that fact. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 170). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

To clarify, Platonic is top-down, formulaic, closed-minded, self-serving, and commoditized; a-Platonic is bottom-up, open-minded, skeptical, and empirical. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 182). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The empirics practiced the “medical art” without relying on reasoning; they wanted to benefit from chance observations by making guesses, and experimented and tinkered until they found something that worked. They did minimal theorizing. Their methods are being revived today as evidence-based medicine, after two millennia of persuasion. Consider that before we knew of bacteria, and their role in diseases, doctors rejected the practice of hand washing because it made no sense to them, despite the evidence of a meaningful decrease in hospital deaths. Ignaz Semmelweis, the mid-nineteenth-century doctor who promoted the idea of hand washing, wasn’t vindicated until decades after his death. Similarly it may not “make sense” that acupuncture works, but if pushing a needle in someone’s toe systematically produces relief from pain (in properly conducted empirical tests), then it could be that there are functions too complicated for us to understand, so let’s go with it for now while keeping our minds open.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 182-183). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

Philosophers since Aristotle have taught us that we are deep-thinking animals, and that we can learn by reasoning. It took a while to discover that we do effectively think, but that we more readily narrate backward in order to give ourselves the illusion of understanding, and give a cover to our past actions. The minute we forgot about this point, the “Enlightenment” came to drill it into our heads for a second time. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 202). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

The lesson for the small is: be human! Accept that being human involves some amount of epistemic arrogance in running your affairs. Do not be ashamed of that. Do not try to always withhold judgment—opinions are the stuff of life. Do not try to avoid predicting—yes, after this diatribe about prediction I am not urging you to stop being a fool. Just be a fool in the right places.fn2 What you should avoid is unnecessary dependence on large-scale harmful predictions—those and only those. Avoid the big subjects that may hurt your future: be fooled in small matters, not in the large. Do not listen to economic forecasters or to predictors in social science (they are mere entertainers), but do make your own forecast for the picnic. By all means, demand certainty for the next picnic; but avoid government social-security forecasts for the year 2040. Know how to rank beliefs not according to their plausibility but by the harm they may cause.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 203). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

This same point can be generalized to life: maximize the serendipity around you. Sextus Empiricus retold the story of Apelles the Painter, who, while doing a portrait of a horse, was attempting to depict the foam from the horse’s mouth. After trying very hard and making a mess, he gave up and, in irritation, took the sponge he used for cleaning his brush and threw it at the picture. Where the sponge hit, it left a perfect representation of the foam.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 204). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I am trying here to generalize to real life the notion of the “barbell” strategy I used as a trader, which is as follows. If you know that you are vulnerable to prediction errors, and if you accept that most “risk measures” are flawed, because of the Black Swan, then your strategy is to be as hyperconservative and hyperaggressive as you can be instead of being mildly aggressive or conservative. Instead of putting your money in “medium risk” investments (how do you know it is medium risk? by listening to tenure-seeking “experts”?), you need to put a portion, say 85 to 90 percent, in extremely safe instruments, like Treasury bills—as safe a class of instruments as you can manage to find on this planet. The remaining 10 to 15 percent you put in extremely speculative bets, as leveraged as possible (like options), preferably venture capital–style portfolios.fn3 That way you do not depend on errors of risk management; no Black Swan can hurt you at all, beyond your “floor,” the nest egg that you have in maximally safe investments. Or, equivalently, you can have a speculative portfolio and insure it (if possible) against losses of more than, say, 15 percent. You are “clipping” your incomputable risk, the one that is harmful to you. Instead of having medium risk, you have high risk on one side and no risk on the other. The average will be medium risk but constitutes a positive exposure to the Black Swan. More technically, this can be called a “convex” combination. Let us see how this can be implemented in all aspects of life.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 205-206). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I find it hard to explain that when you have a very limited loss you need to get as aggressive, as speculative, and sometimes as “unreasonable” as you can be. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 207). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

^^Don’t look for the precise and the local. Simply, do not be narrow-minded. The great discoverer Pasteur, who came up with the notion that chance favors the prepared, understood that you do not look for something particular every morning but work hard to let contingency enter your working life.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 208). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. ^^

Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think. Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again. I am sometimes shocked at how little people realize that these opportunities do not grow on trees. Collect as many free nonlottery tickets (those with open-ended payoffs) as you can, and, once they start paying off, do not discard them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 208-209). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters—you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. The idea of settling in a rural area on grounds that one has good communications “in the age of the Internet” tunnels out of such sources of positive uncertainty. Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs—not dry correspondence or telephone conversations. Go to parties! If you’re a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. And if you are autistic, send your associates to these events.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 209). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

All these recommendations have one point in common: asymmetry. Put yourself in situations where favorable consequences are much larger than unfavorable ones. Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decisions around that.

Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 210). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

A theory is like medicine (or government): often useless, sometimes necessary, always self-serving, and on occasion lethal. So it needs to be used with care, moderation, and close adult supervision. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 284). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

In the end this is a trivial decision making rule: I am very aggressive when I can gain exposure to positive Black Swans—when a failure would be of small moment—and very conservative when I am under threat from a negative Black Swan. I am very aggressive when an error in a model can benefit me, and paranoid when the error can hurt. This may not be too interesting except that it is exactly what other people do not do. In finance, for instance, people use flimsy theories to manage their risks and put wild ideas under “rational” scrutiny. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (p. 296). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception. Recall my discussion in Chapter 8 on the difficulty in seeing the true odds of the events that run your own life. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportions. Imagine a speck of dust next to a planet a billion times the size of the earth. The speck of dust represents the odds in favor of your being born; the huge planet would be the odds against it. So stop sweating the small stuff. Don’t be like the ingrate who got a castle as a present and worried about the mildew in the bathroom. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth—remember that you are a Black Swan. And thank you for reading my book. Taleb, Nassim. The Black Swan (pp. 297-298). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.