A reluctant best-selling author

NASSIM Nicholas Taleb winces when described as a best-selling author. His third book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is arguably the best known among his five books so far. It reportedly spent 36 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list; the second edition was released in 2010.

Mr Taleb thinks The Black Swan is widely misunderstood. "The Black Swan harmed my reputation because (stores) put the book beside (Malcolm) Gladwell, so put me in the same crowd. Second thing, which is worse, is people started buying the book and complaining that they don't understand it.

"The mistake with The Black Swan is to think black swans are phenomena that we can't understand, and so we should try to understand them. My point is not to try to understand them but to work around them."