The Impact of the Highly Improbable

David A. Shaywitz reviews The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

If 100 random people gather in a room and the world's tallest man walks in, the average height doesn't change much. But if Bill Gates walks in, the average net worth rises dramatically. Height follows the bell curve in its distribution. Wealth does not...

The ubiquity of the bell curve lulls us into believing that we can predict the future—but many probability distributions are not normal. And the future may be stranger than we think.