FundamentallySound Blog

Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us about how little we can actually predict and how we should never ever listen to experts. An immigrant taxi driver in San Francisco can predict what will happen in Afghanistan much better than a college-educated Afghan studies professor.

His basic idea is that the world is full of black swans, events that are completely unpredictable and are going to happen when we least expect it. These are the events that cause history to jump, in personal as well as geo-cultural ways. He says we live in Extremistan, a world we have been making for the last thousand years, one in which the black swan plays a huge role.

In his book 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' he points out how we are very good at predicting the outcomes of simple encounters, like a police raid. But we are almost always wrong at predicting complex encounters, like a war.

And yes, isn't it always a fool's errand to predict events a year from now?

His philosophy is very liberating. On a warm pseudo-summer day when I am dreaming of moving to Berlin, and just ridding myself of all the American paranoia and hysteria that I absorb on a daily basis, his ideas of embracing chaos and giving up on control are almost enough to make me just book the ticket and go.