The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2007
444 pages / 14 hours and 20 minutes
Nonfiction

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It is very likely that the most impactful events of your life are going to be things you never saw coming. We try to plan our lives out and create walls of protection for our families and the people we love. But the uncertainty of the world makes this all quite impossible, which makes The Black Swan highly relevant. In fact it is more important today than it was when it was written in 2007. The subtitle is perfect.

It is hard to exactly characterize what Nassim Nicholas Taleb does, but maybe the easiest way to think about it is that he does risk assessment. Also when it comes to the stock market he apparently likes to bet on disaster. What disaster? That’s exactly the point: you never see it coming.

One of the interesting stories within the book is about how Taleb and some other risk assessors were called in to consult with a Las Vegas casino. The casino business is risky in the sense that if you have a customer who figures out how to game the system you could lose some very big bucks. So the risk assessors did their normal work, but Taleb notes that they failed to assess what turned out to be the greatest risk to this particular casino: that one of their star performers would maul and almost kill another of their performers. Do you remember Siegfried and Roy? If you don’t, take a moment and go look it up. I will wait for you here. They did not do risk assessment on a tiger attack.

The book is data rich, which some readers may find a little tiresome, but it’s full of great anecdotes that support the mathematical case. It is also one of the excellent books to read to understand randomness, a concept that few really grasp.

I thought when I first read this book that few others had read it, but this turns out to be untrue. The book actually has quite a wide readership. And for people who like to be in control (that would be every human being) the book creates queasiness as you come to understand how many things are utterly beyond your control.

When I first read this book a decade ago, it profoundly impacted how I think about my teaching and particularly the training of ministers. We always try to train toward competence and we cover as many different scenarios as we can possibly imagine occurring in the life of the minister. I now see this for the fool’s errand that it was. It is impossible to cover every conceivable occurrence, and in fact the most profound experiences in our ministry and lives will be tiger attacks – that is, things we could never see coming. So the point is not to anticipate everything but rather to create such a deep spiritual grounding that, even when one experiences that tiger attack you never saw coming, you still have the spiritual resources to survive.