Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom - Times Online:
"Stuff happens. The world is random, intrinsically unknowable. “You will never,” he says, “be able to control randomness.”
To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”"
