The Black Swan (A Book Review)

Have you ever seen a black swan?  At one time, scientist concluded there was no such thing.  When black swans were later discovered in Australia, Europeans were forced to rethink their science around swans. In the same way, discovering the book Black Swan will cause you to rethink much of what you "know" about decision making and other aspects of conducting business and life in general.

Taleb talks about Black Swan events--events like the discovery of the black swans of Australia as events that just should not occur based on our expectations--but these events do happen, nevertheless.  Sometimes toward the good, but of more importance, for the worse, as negative black swans are harder to recover from.  Taleb does not believe we can get better at predicting these events, but he hopes to get us to be less naive--that is, to expect these events, and be prepared to take advantage of the good black swans, and not be quite so harmed by the bad black swans.

Listen to this review to hear the important lessons jam packed into this book--so you too can be ready to survive the negative black swans while exploiting the good.

Listen now: (download)

References:
The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking

Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Russ mentioned a tenet of Lean Software Development that defers decision making until you have more information, which on the face of it, goes against what Taleb recommends:  Last Responsible Moment