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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 3 quotes · Black Swan, Military, Risk

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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Quotes

“The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.”

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Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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“I came to discuss Black Swans, and I intended to tell them that the only thing I know is that we know precious little about them, but that it was their property to sneak up on us, and that attempts at Platonifying them led to additional misunderstandings. Military people can understand such things, and the idea became recently prevalent in military circles with the expression unknown unknown (as opposed to the known unknown).”

RiskMilitaryUncertaintyBlack SwanUnknown Unknowns
Book:The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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