Nassim Taleb

Outside the Box
In The Black Swan, Taleb argues that we have been lulled into a kind of complacency by our reliance on statistical models that create the illusion of patterns. In fact, he says, history is not dominated by predictable events, but highly improbable ones, that disrupt societies and markets. Events like 9/11, market crashes, and radical technological innovations are significant precisely because they confound our expectations of the world as an orderly place.