# Quote — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

> Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients — and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish.

- Author: [Nassim Nicholas Taleb](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb.md)
- Book: [The Black Swan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan.md)
- Page: 149
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb#The_Black_Swan:_The_Impact_of_the_Highly_Improbable_(2007)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/cumulative-errors-depend

## More from this book

> There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient (...), and a random one (...). In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing.

p. 142 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/there-is-no-effective.md)

> History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

p. 8 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/history-is-opaque.md)

> Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

p. 15 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nassim-nicholas-taleb/the-black-swan/categorizing-is-necessary.md)