• Prologue
  • On the Plumage of Birds
    • What You Do Not Know
    • Experts and “Empty Suits”
    • Learning to Learn
  • A New Kind of Ingratitude
  • Life Is Very Unusual
  • Plato and the Nerd
  • Too Dull to Write About
  • The Bottom Line
    • Chapters Map
• Part One - Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary, or How We Seek Validation
  • Chapter One - The Apprenticeship of An Empirical Skeptic
    • Anatomy of a Black Swan
      • On Walking Walks
      • “Paradise” Evaporated
      • The Starred Night
    • History and the Triplet of Opacity
      • Nobody Knows What’s Going On
      • History Does Not Crawl, It Jumps
      • Dear Diary: On History Running Backward
      • Education in a Taxicab
    • Clusters
      • Where Is the Show?
    • 8¾ Lbs Later
      • The Four-Letter Word of Independence
      • Limousine Philosopher
  • Chapter Two - Yevgenia’s Black Swan
  • Chapter Three - The Speculator and the Prostitute
    • The Best (Worst) Advice
    • Beware the Scalable
      • The Advent of Scalability
    • Scalability and Globalization
    • Travels Inside Mediocristan
      • The Strange Country of Extremistan
      • Extremistan and Knowledge
      • Wild and Mild
      • The Tyranny of the Accident
  • Chapter Four - One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
    • How to Learn from the Turkey
      • Trained to Be Dull
      • A Black Swan Is Relative to Knowledge
    • A Brief History of the Black Swan Problem
      • Sextus the (Alas) Empirical
      • Algazel
      • The Skeptic, Friend of Religion
      • I Don’t Want to Be a Turkey
      • They Want to Live in Mediocristan
  • Chapter Five - Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
    • Zoogles Are Not All Boogles
    • Evidence
    • Negative Empiricism
      • Counting to Three
      • Saw Another Red Mini!
      • Not Everything
      • Back to Mediocristan
  • Chapter Six - The Narrative Fallacy
    • On the Causes of My Rejection of Causes
    • Splitting Brains
      • A Little More Dopamine
      • Andrey Nikolayevich’s Rule
      • A Better Way to Die
    • Remembrance of Things Not Quite Past
      • The Madman’s Narrative
      • Narrative and Therapy
    • To Be Wrong with Infinite Precision
      • Dispassionate Science
    • The Sensational and the Black Swan
      • Black Swan Blindness
      • The Pull of the Sensational
    • The Shortcuts
      • Beware the Brain
      • How to Avert the Narrative Fallacy
  • Chapter Seven - Living in the Antechamber of Hope
    • Peer Cruelty
      • Where the Relevant Is the Sensational
      • Nonlinearities
      • Process over Results
      • Human Nature, Happiness, and Lumpy Rewards
      • The Antechamber of Hope
      • Inebriated by Hope
      • The Sweet Trap of Anticipation
      • When You Need the Bastiani Fortress
    • El desierto de los tártaros
      • Bleed or Blowup
  • Chapter Eight - Giacomo Casanova’s Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence
    • The Story of the Drowned Worshippers
    • The Cemetery of Letters
      • How to Become a Millionaire in Ten Steps
    • A Health Club for Rats
      • Vicious Bias
      • More Hidden Applications
      • The Evolution of the Swimmer’s Body
    • What You See and What You Don’t See
      • Doctors
    • The Teflon-style Protection of Giacomo Casanova
      • “I Am a Risk Taker”
    • I Am a Black Swan: The Anthropic Bias
      • The Cosmetic Because
  • Chapter Nine - The Ludic Fallacy, or the Uncertainty of the Nerd
    • Fat Tony
      • Non-Brooklyn John
    • Lunch at Lake Como
      • The Uncertainty of the Nerd
      • Gambling with the Wrong Dice
    • Wrapping Up Part One
      • The Cosmetic Rises to the Surface
      • Distance from Primates
• Part Two - We Just Can’t Predict
  • From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré
  • Chapter Ten - The Scandal of Prediction
    • On the Vagueness of Catherine’s Lover Count
    • Black Swan Blindness Redux
      • Guessing and Predicting
    • Information Is Bad for Knowledge
    • The Expert Problem, or the Tragedy of the Empty Suit
      • What Moves and What Does Not Move
      • How to Have the Last Laugh
      • Events Are Outlandish
      • Herding Like Cattle
      • I Was “Almost” Right
      • Reality? What For?
    • “Other Than That,” It Was Okay
    • Don’t Cross a River if It Is (on Average) Four Feet Deep
  • Chapter Eleven - How to Look for Bird Poop
  • Chapter Twelve - Epistemocracy, a Dream
  • Chapter Thirteen - Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do If You Cannot Predict?
• Part Three - Those Gray Swans of Extremistan
• Part Four - The End
• Epilogue: Yevgenia’s White Swans