The Black Swan
**GUEST AUTHOR ALERT** This is Lyndsay’s fiancé, Devin (we just got engaged recently, so it is still difficult to say that word casually). I read The Black Swan about six months ago and feel it is particularly pertinent to the moment we’re living in now that the Coronavirus has taken over our daily lives, so I decided to review it. I hope my post lives up to the quality loyal Lyndsay’s Lit Review-ers have come to expect and enjoy.
My biggest takeaway from The Black Swan is that the author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is an incredibly innovative thinker. There are many moments in the book where Taleb takes a well-held belief that my cookie-cutter MBA education has taught me and ties it into pretzel knots. Because of how against the grain his arguments are, the book was difficult to read at times, but that’s the point - we like comfy narratives that fit neatly into our models of the world and we reject ideas that clash with those narratives, sometimes to our detriment.
Taleb’s central thesis of the book is that we live in a time where outliers drive an outsized impact on outcomes and our cognitive biases prevent us from acting optimally in that environment. Black swans can be positive or negative… for instance, you could be an author that happens to get lucky and writes a hit book that sells a million copies or you could be a book publisher that happens to get unlucky and loses a significant amount of sales when suddenly your CEO is #canceled. These events are inherently difficult to predict, so humans tend to ignore them in their analysis of the future. Instead, we assume the most likely or average outcome and then invest our resources accordingly. Unfortunately, that approach leads to unpreparedness if and when a rare event hits.
Taleb also argues that we retrospectively try to attribute causal factors to black swan events and overemphasize those factors on our predictions going forward. The human mind hates cognitive dissonance and looks for a clean narrative to explain outcomes. Once we believe we know the causal factors, we overweigh their significance in our minds going forward. Everyone was terrified to fly after the Sept 11 attacks, but the odds of a similar event occurring were actually much lower immediately after the event because of all the increased security. These retrospective narratives skew our predictions of the future while ignoring other random events that may occur.
The impact of the Coronavirus outbreak on our lives is still difficult to digest. Two weeks ago, my MBA classmates and I were preparing for spring break vacations, a victory lap spring semester, and new exciting jobs - now, all of that is in question because of a random event, erasing the longest bull market ever in 28 days. The lessons from this book have me thinking a lot about how we could’ve better prepared for a random event like this and how I can avoid buying into retrospective narratives on Twitter. For now, I’m channeling my inner-Boo Radley and flattening the f*ck out of this curve.
Overall, I didn’t find the book particularly easy to read because it jumps around a lot and has pretty technical language, but if you’re looking for something to change your perspective while you’re cooped up in quarantine, then this is a good pick. The Black Swan receives 4 out of 5 flames.
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