Als "Black Swan" bezeichnet Taleb ein Ereignis, das (aus unserer beschränkten Sicht) genauso unwahrscheinlich wie wirkungsvoll ist. Diese Ereignisse sind deshalb so bedeutungsvoll, weil wir völlig selbstverständlich dazu tendieren, das Unwahrscheinliche zu ignorieren, der Eintritt eines "Black Swans", so unwahrscheinlich und selten er sein mag, aber immense Auswirkungen hat.
Eine Parallele zu vielen, ganz offensichtlich nicht vorhersehbaren Ereignissen, die die Welt veränderten, kann damit gezogen werden, und Taleb scheut sich nicht, dazu auch Ereignisse wie den zweiten Weltkrieg oder die Erfindung des Internets zu zählen. Nicht zuletzt qualifiziert sich die gerade aktuelle Bankenkrise als ein hervorragendes Beispiel: "Lehman Brothers geht NIE IM LEBEN pleite .." ;-)
Als Vorgeschmack auf dieses äußerst lesenswerte Buch hier ein paar interessante Zitate aus dem ersten Kapitel, die einen guten Überblick geben:
- Why do we keep focusing on the minutiae, not the possible large events, in spite of the obvious evidence of their huge influence? And, if you follow my argument, why does reading the newspapers actually decrease your knowledge of the world?
- Black Swan logic makes what you don't know far more important than what you know. Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected.
- Think of the terrorist attack on September 11th (..) Isn't t strange to see an event happening precisely because it was not supposed to happen?
- The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history.
- What is suprising is not the magnitude of our forecast errors, but our absence of awareness of it. We can easily trigger Black Swans thanks to aggressive ignorance - like a child playing with a chemistry kit. Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence rather than naively try to predict them.
- The more unexpected the success of a venture, the smaller the number of competitors, and the more successful the entrepreneur who implements the idea.
- The strategy for discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. (...) try to collect as many Black Swans as you can.
- We tend to learn the precise, not the general. (...) The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. We scorn the abstract with passion.
- (..) stand conventional wisdom on its head and to show how inapplicale it is to our modern, complex and increasingly recursive (meaning an increasing number of feedback loops, events causing more events) environment.
- Few reward acts of prevention, we glorify those who let their names in history books at the expense of those contributors about whom our books are silent.
- Can you asses the danger a criminal poses by examining only what he does on an ordinary day? Almost everything in social life is produced by rare but consequential shocks and jumps; all the while almost everything studied about social life focuses in the "normal", particulary with "bell curve" methods of inference that tell you close to nothing. Why? Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty.
