The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Couple of weeks ago I finished reading “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. I greatly recommend this book, in fact I am now reading Nassim’s previous book.
What is a black swan? Briefly an unknown unknown. Something that is completely out of the blue that it’s practically impossible to plan for. If you planned for it, the black swan would be something else. 
Not to say that you can’t protect yourself from it.
The book shows a couple of great way to think about your data and how to prove, or better to disprove, your theories. I have found that negative empiricism has served me well in the past few weeks. Negative empiricism is pretty much trying to find data points that disprove your theory. It’s way to easy to find data points that prove your theory, for as long as you create some reasoning around them, some ‘narrative’, you can make sense out of all kind of random events. We humans are quite adept at doing so too. For as many data points as you can find you’ll never be truly 100% sure that your theory is correct.
On the other hand once you have a theory, 1 single data point is all that is need to debunk it. It’s much faster that way to come to a good theory.
I have found myself many times a victim of the narrative fallacy, brought to my attention this writer as well as from Dan Ariely.
Overall lots of great new concepts, ludic fallacy being one of them, highly recommend it.
