The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Taleb shifts his focus to the fallacy, or fraud, of the bell curve as a means for understanding extreme events. He discusses the role of luck in generating Black Swans. Whenever luck is at play, the idea that the "world isn't fair" circulates at a higher rate. After all, with so much randomness, how could the world truly be fair? However, in Extremistan, which increasingly resembles our modern world, even the random nature of luck does not guarantee either success or failure in a permanent way. As Taleb argues, "a loser might always remain a loser, but a winner could be unseated by someone new popping up out of nowhere. Nobody is safe" (221). The power of unpredictability is the main operating idea in this chapter; luck is by nature unpredictable.

Taleb discusses how the Gaussian bell curve—named after its ideator, mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss—has been used to inaccurately convey the probability of an event happening. The bell curve is a probability distribution. According to the model, data points near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean.

In Taleb's view, using the

Unlock all 35 pages of this Study Guide

Plus, gain access to 8,450+ more expert-written Study Guides.

Including features:

+ Mobile App

+ Printable PDF

+ Literary AI Tools

Unlock Full Library