The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007).

keywords: black swan, Mediocristan versus Extremistan, expert versus pseudo-expert

"philosophy...Wittgenstein...language problems...may certainly be important to attain prominence in philosophy departments, but they are something we, practitioners and decision makers in the real world, leave for the weekend." [emphasis original] (p. xxvi, prologue)

"a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know...the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary." [emphasis original] (p. 1)

"To borrow from Warren Buffett, don't ask the barber if you need a haircut - and don't ask an academic if what he does is relevant." (p. 183)