Catalogue of the library of the late Alexander Farnum, esq., of Providence, Rhode Island ..

Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously. Let us call an antischolarБЂ”someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement deviceБЂ”a skeptical empiricist. The chapters in this section address the question of how we humans deal with knowledgeБЂ”and our preference for the anecdotal over the empirical. Chapter 1 presents the Black Swan as grounded in the story of my own obsession. I will make a central distinction between the two varieties of randomness in Chapter 3. After that, Chapter 4 briefly returns to the Black Swan problem in its original form: how we tend to generalize from what we see. Then I present the three facets of the same Black Swan problem: a) The error of confirmation, or how we are likely to undeservedly scorn the virgin part of the library (the tendency to look at what confirms our knowledge, not our ignorance), in Chapter 5; b) the narrative fallacy, or how we fool ourselves with stories and anecdotes (Chapter 6); c) how emotions get in the way of our inference (Chapter 7); and d) the problem of silent evidence, or the tricks history uses to hide Black Swans from us (Chapter 8) ...»