You can't predict life's black swans

摘要

Every so often, unpredictable things change the course of our lives: wars, economic upheavals or new technologies. Applied statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls these rare, high-impact events "black swans" and is fascinated by how we rationalise them with the benefit of hindsight. Most worrying to him is the delusion that we can forecast such events. In economics, science and other disciplines, he says, so-called experts are constantly mistaken in thinking they can forecast the next big thing - and their overconfidence can be dangerous for all of us, especially when it translates into government policy. As Taleb explains to Michael Bond, we are not cut out to understand wildly random events, and the sooner we realise that the better.