The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Taleb emphasizes the notion that human beings are limited in their ability to not only retain knowledge, but to process and apply information in a consistent manner. Most of human reasoning, he says, is filtered through devices such as narratives and revisionist interpretations. Human beings respond and interpret events through the lens of their own social-emotional mechanisms, as opposed to sound logic. According to Taleb, our collective inability to predict or even imagine a Black Swan event corroborates this limitation. As a result, Black Swans make an even greater impact on society, since we are not emotionally prepared for the event and its subsequent consequences.

Human limitations are not borne of malice or a desire to disengage from the real world, but a biological limitation of the human brain itself. Taleb argues that the more random information is, the more complex it becomes, which prevents our brains from indexing and categorizing it. If the brain cannot categorize new information, it does not fully process it. Even if someone has knowledge of a Black Swan event, in the sense that they know what happened, they will likely not be able to interpret it accurately, without relying on narratives constructed in hindsight.