Top Highlights

• So while weight, height, and calorie consumption are from Mediocristan, wealth is not. Almost all social matters are from Extremistan. Another way to say it is that social quantities are informational, not physical: you cannot touch them. Money in a bank account is something important, but certainly not physical.
• Mistaking a naïve observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan.
• Black Swan logic makes what you don’t know far more relevant than what you do know.fn4 Consider that many Black Swans can be caused and exacerbated by their being unexpected.
• In this world, you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data. This is a very simple test of uncertainty that allows you to distinguish between the two kinds of randomness.
• based! Lesson? That awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.