Excellent and extensive book review from Charles Fitzgerald.
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is sort of a follow-up to his earlier Fooled By the Randomness, which dealt with why people are poorly suited to decision-making in the face of uncertainty.
The Black Swan deals with the "impact of the highly improbable" and argues that these events, dubbed Black Swans, are far more common then we think, in part because of the perverse influence of modern statistics which assumes all kinds of things are normally distributed except for the minor detail that they aren't.
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