Escape From Pianosa

I just finished reading the most amazing book–The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s a real masterpiece of an essay. I learned so much from the book that I can barely begin to describe it all.

The most important ideas I learned are that there are major limits to our knowledge, and that uncertainty plays a large role in our lives. Experts and laymen alike are simply not good at predicting the future–especially “Black Swans,” extremely high-impact events that are unforeseeable. There can be good black swans (your novel becomes a bestseller making your rich) and bad ones (the stock market crashes and your retirement fund is wiped out).

Taleb delves deeply into epistemology–which inspired me to read Karl Popper–and so many other areas like probability, prediction, markets, bell curves vs. power laws; the book is so fascinating, you’ll just have to read it yourself.