Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a very intelligent writer with a great sense of humour.The black swan deals with an extremely dull subject namely the impact of the highly improbable. "One single sighting of black swan can invalidate a general belief derived from millenia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans" hence the name.
Taleb’s central point of argument throughout the entire book is that what you don’t know is far more relevant than what you do know.One unexpetced turn of events can overturn an understanding based on lifetime of experience and millions of empirical evidence is what Taleb argues(quite convincingly for that matter).I will just take one of the examples sited by the author. Till the Thanksgiving day the Turkey is fed regularly and lavishly by the humans.
Every single feeding will firm up the Turkey’s belief that it is the general rule of the life to be fed every day by the friendly members of the human race i.e.till the day before Thanksgiving when it incurs a "revision of belief".The same is the case in our lives. Think about a terrorist attack, a swine flu or a personal loss for that matter.The same logic holds. Hence as per Taleb it does not make sense to plan without making generous allowances for the unexpected. What else to do?
Go on predict but avoid dependance on large scale harmful predictions.Be prepared, benefit from unpredictability.Be ready for positive accidents. In a nutshell be acceptable to serendipity.NNT has devoted his lifetime towards the study of unpredictability and randomness.His command over the subject and the language is obvious.His style fluid and humorous.In this book he manages to accomplish a very difficult thing. He manages to convert a hardcore fiction reader to an ardent admirer of his subject. Go ahead...read it..it will be an interesting change.The book is brought to you by Penguin books and costs Rs.395 for the paperback edition.