The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book about randomness and uncertainty by epistemologist Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Black Swan theory refers to a large-impact, hard-to-predict and rare event beyond the realm of *normal* expectations or logic. His theory refers to events of large consequence and their dominant role in history. Black Swan events are a special category of outliers.

From the prologue:

I am drawn to his book so much these days that, DURING the days, while often spending thought energy on the arbitrary, I crave returning to read more of Nassim’s words in the wonderful and whimsical evening to help balance against, as he writes so eloquently, naive empiricism.

That’s the trouble with good work like this : such ideas find us re-examining our immediate environment, our time-investments, priorities, the whole can of worms, all-the-while identifying every detail both aligned and misaligned with our freshly-evolved perspective and motivation.

Tough? Sometimes.

Highly recommended? Indefatigably.

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