The Black Swan

This is one of the most influential books I have read in a long time. A must read for people who do forecasting and prediction. Taleb posits that we build narratives of our experience to help us predict the future. While this may serve sociological needs, it can be very dangerous in making scientific predictions. This is especially the case for "Black Swans", those highly improbable but significant events that we would never anticipate based on our past experience.