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This is one of those must-reads for anyone interested in knowing what's going to happen in the future. The basic premise of the book is that while we can predict the most probable outcome of most things, based on what we know, the things we don't know can potentially have a huge disruptive effect on our predictions.
We can forecast that, based on weather records, we're probably going to have good weather for our coming holiday, or the stock market is going to continue doing well, or anticipate a great career with a good company like Enron, Bear Stearns or Mirror Group Newspapers. But we don't know about the 'outliers', the events that are going to totally spoil our plans. The most famous example is the butterfly effect, but the principle holds true for many other realms. Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a compelling argument for admitting that we know a lot less than we think we do and building our strategies around that truth, instead of trusting that everything will continue the same as before. We can't predict what's going to happen, but we can predict that something will happen, and should plan accordingly. It makes sense to me, and it was the number one non-fiction book on Amazon.com for 2007, so I guess it's making sense to a lot of other people. He's selling more books than Alan Greenspan! Summary of his arguments to be found here. Take look at this interview on Bloomberg.com .
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