CONTENTS Prologue xvii On the Plumage of Birds xvii What You Do Not Know xix Experts and Empty Suits xx Learning to Learn xxi A New Kind of Ingratitude xxii Life Is Very Unusual xxiv Plato and the Nerd xxv Too Dull to Write About xxvi The Bottom Line xxvii Chapters Map xxviii PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION 1 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic 3 Anatomy of a Black Swan 3 On Walking Walks 6 Paradise Evaporated 7 The Starred Night 7 History and the Triplet of Opacity 8 Nobody Knows What's Going On 9 History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps10 Dear Diary: On History Running Backward 12 Education in a Taxicab 14 Clusters 15 Where Is the Show? 17 8 3/4 Lbs Later 18 The Four-Letter Word of Independence 20 Limousine Philosopher 21 2: Yevgenia's Black Swan 23 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute 26 The Best (Worst) Advice 26 Beware the Scalable 28 The Advent of Scalability 29 Scalability and Globalization 31 Travels Inside Mediocristan 32 The Strange Country of Extremistan 33 Extremistan and Knowledge 34 Wild and Mild 35 The Tyranny of the Accident 35 Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 38 How to Learn from the Turkey 40 Trained to Be Dull 43 A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge 44 A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem 45 Sextus the (Alas) Empirical 46 Algazel 47 The Skeptic, Friend of Religion 48 / Don't Want to Be a Turkey 49 They Want to Live in Mediocristan 49 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmation! 51 Zoogles Are Not All Boogies 53 Evidence 55 Negative Empiricism 56 Counting to Three 58 Saw Another Red Mini!59 Not Everything 60 Back to Mediocristan 61 6: The Narrative Fallacy 62 On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes 62 Splitting Brains 64 A Little More Dopamine 67 Andrey Nikolayevich's Rule 68 A Better Way to Die 70 Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past 70 The Madman's Narrative 71 Narrative and Therapy 73 To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision 74 Dispassionate Science 75 The Sensational and the Black Swan 76 Black Swan Blindness 77 The Pull of the Sensational 79 The Shortcuts 81 Beware the Brain 82 How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy 83 7: Living in the Antechamber of Hope 85 Peer Cruelty ' 86 Where the Relevant Is the Sensational 87 Nonlinearities 88 Process over Results 89 Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards 91 The Antechamber of Hope 92 Inebriated by Hope 92 The Sweet Trap of Anticipation 93 When You Need the Bastiani Fortress 94 El desierto de los tartaros 94 Bleed or Blowup 96 8: Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence 100 The Story of the Drowned Worshippers 100 The Cemetery of Letters 102 How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps 105 A Health Club for Rats 107 Vicious Bias 108 More Hidden Applications 108 The Evolution of the Swimmer's Body 109 What You See and What You Don't See 110 Doctors 112 The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova 112 I Am a Risk Taker 115 I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias 117 The Cosmetic Because 119 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd 122 Fat Tony 122 Non-Brooklyn John 123 Lunch at Lake Como 125 The Uncertainty of the Nerd 127 Gambling with the Wrong Dice 129 Wrapping Up Part One 131 The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface 131 Distance from Primates 132 PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT 135 From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincare 136 10: The Scandal of Prediction 137 On the Vagueness of Catherine's Lover Count 138 Black Swan Blindness Redux 141 Guessing and Predicting 142 Information Is Bad for Knowledge 142 The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit 145 What Moves and What Does Not Move 145 How to Have the Last Laugh 148 Events Are Outlandish 149 Herding Like Cattle 150 I Was Almost Right 151 Reality? What For? 154 Other Than That, It Was Okay 156 The Beauty of Technology: Excel Spreadsheets 158 The Character of Prediction Errors 159 Don't Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep 160 Get Another Job 163 AtJFK 163 11: How to Look for Bird Poop 165 How to Look for Bird Poop 165 Inadvertent Discoveries 166 A Solution Waiting for a Problem 169 Keep Searching 170 How to Predict Your Predictions! 171 The Nth Billiard Ball 174 Third Republic-Style Decorum 174 The Three Body Problem 176 They Still Ignore Hayek 179 How Not to Be a Nerd 181 Academic Libertarianism 183 Prediction and Free Will 183 The Grueness of Emerald 185 That Great Anticipation Machine 189 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream 190 Monsieur de Montaigne, Epistemocrat 191 Epistemocracy 192 The Past's Past, and the Past's Future 193 Prediction, Misprediction, and Happiness 194 Helenus and the Reverse Prophecies 195 The Melting Ice Cube 196 Once Again, Incomplete Information 197 What They Call Knowledge 198 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict? 201 Advice Is Cheap, Very Cheap 201 Being a Fool in the Right Places 203 Be Prepared 203 The Idea of Positive Accident 203 Volatility and Risk of Black Swan 204 Barbell Strategy 205 Nobody Knows Anything 206 The Great Asymmetry 210 PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN 213 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back 215 The World Is Unfair 215 The Matthew Effect 216 Lingua Franca 218 Ideas and Contagions Nobody Is Safe in Extremistan 220 A Brooklyn Frenchman 221 The Long Tail 223 Naive Globalization 225 Reversals Away from Extremistan 227 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud 229 The Gaussian and the Mandelbrotian 229 The Increase in the Decrease 231 The Mandelbrotian 232 What to Remember 234 Inequality 234 Extremistan and the 80/20 Rule 235 Grass and Trees 236 How Coffee Drinking Can Be Safe 237 Love of Certainties 239 How to Cause Catastrophes 240 Quetelet's Average Monster 240 Golden Mediocrity 241 God's Error 242 Poincare to the Rescue 243 Eliminating Unfair Influence 243 The Greeks Would Have Deified It 244 Yes/No Only Please 244 A (Literary) Thought Experiment on Where the Bell CurveComes From 245 Those Comforting Assumptions 250 The Ubiquity of the Gaussian 251 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness 253 The Poet of Randomness 253 The Platonicity of Triangles 256 The Geometry of Nature 256 Fractality 257 A Visual Approach to Extremistan/Mediocristan 259 Pearls to Swine 260 The Logic of Fractal Randomness (with a Warning) 262 The Problem of the Upper Bound 266 Beware the Precision 266 The Water Puddle Revisited 267 From Representation to Reality 268 Once Again, Beware the Forecasters 270 Once Again, a Happy Solution 270 Where Is the Gray Swan? 272 Chapter 17: Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places 274 Only Fifty Years 275 The Clerks' Betrayal 275 Anyone Can Become President 277 More Horror 278 Confirmation 281 It Was Just a Black Swan 281 How to Prove Things 282 Chapter 18: The Uncertainty ot the Phony 286 Ludic Fallacy Redux 286 Find the Phony 287 Can Philosophers Be Dangerous to Society? 288 The Problem of Practice 289 How Many Wittgensteins Can Dance on the Head of a Pin? 289 Where Is Popper When You Need Him? 290 The Bishop and the Analyst 291 Easier Than You Think: The Problem of Decision Under Skepticism 292 PART FOUR: THE END 293 Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan 295 When Missing a Train Is Painless 297 The End 297 Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans 299 Acknowledgments 301 Glossary 307 Notes 311 Bibliography 331 Index 359