Unpredictability

Over the past few centuries, many attempts have been made to predict various events. The author argued that most of these attempts resulted in wrong predictions, and if they were right, it was not due to having built a reliable prediction technique. Over all this time, people had been fooling themselves. The condition became worse with computerized spreadsheets and other modeling programs. What actually characterized the world was a high level of unpredictability.

Most people have had a hard time accepting the fact that the world remained unpredictable despite all the work that had gone into making predictions. The entire discipline of statistics was shown to be of little value other than for maintaining an illusionary belief in the nature of future events. The majority of them would happen without anyone anticipating that they could happen, which the author called Black Swan events.

Human nature had developed to...