The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Random House Digital, Inc., Apr 17, 2007 - Business & Economics - 366 pages

A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.
 
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
 
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.
 
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.
 
Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb
 
“The most prophetic voice of all.”—GQ
 
Praise for The Black Swan
 
“[A book] that altered modern thinking.”—The Times (London)
 
“A masterpiece.”—Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail
 
“Idiosyncratically brilliant.”—Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times
 
“The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate
 
“[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne. . . . We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias [and] narrative fallacy.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Hugely enjoyable—compelling . . . easy to dip into.”—Financial Times
 
“Engaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review


From the Hardcover edition.

What people are saying

Review: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

User Review  - Vincent Li - Goodreads

Thought provoking.

Review: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

User Review  - Glen Hastings - Goodreads

Five stars for the concept and the idea. The black swan model is applicable in most of the work I do day in day out. I can only give the book four stars as Taleb too often rants against his detractors which is not my reason for reading a great business book

Contents

• On History Running Backward: 12
• V4 Lbs Later: 18
• The Speculotor and the Prostitute: 26
• One Thousand and One Doys or How Not to Be a Sucker: 38
• Confirmation Shmontirmction: 51
• The Narrative Fallacy: 62
• Living in the Antechomber of Hope: 85
• The Story of the Drowned Worslmippcrs: 100
• The Ludic Fallacy or The Uncertainty at the Nerd: 122
• WE JUST CANT PREDICT I35: 136
• How to Look tor Bird Poop: 165
• Epistemocrccy 0 Dream: 190
• Appelles the Pointer or What Do You Do it: 201
• THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN: 213
• The Bell Curve That Great Intellectual Fraud: 229
• The Aesthetics of Randomness: 253
• The Logic of Fractal Randomness with a Warning: 262
• Lockes Madmen or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places: 274
• The Uncertainty ot the Phony: 286
• Hall and Hall or How to Get Even with the Black Swan: 295
• GLOSSARV: 301
• lLearning from Mother Nature the Oldest and the Wisest: 307
• Do All This Walking or How Systems Become Fragile: 324
• lllMCITQOIITOS Ante POTCOS: 330
• IVAsperger and the Ontologlcal Black Swan: 339
• VPerhaps the Most Useful Problem In the History: 347
• The Problem of Induction and Causation in the Complex Domain: 358
• VllWhat to Do with the Fourth Quadrant: 367
• VlllThe Ten Principles tor a BlackSwanRobust Society: 374
• NOTES: 381
• BIBLIOGRAPHY: 401
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE FIRST EDITION: 431
• INDEX: 437

About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge, and he has led three high-profile careers around his ideas, as a man of letters, as a businessman-trader, and as a university professor. Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His work has been published in thirty-three languages.


From the Hardcover edition.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
• Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc., 2007
• ISBN: 1588365832, 9781588365835
• Length: 366 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / General; Philosophy / Epistemology