The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don’t know, now with a new section called “On Robustness and Fragility.” 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 will change the way you look at the world, 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. 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. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan. |
Contents
UMBERTO ECOS ANTILIBRARY OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION | 1 |
73 | 8 |
Limousine Philosopher | 21 |
One Thousand and One Days or How Not to Be a Sucker | 38 |
Confirmation Shmonfirmation | 51 |
Not Everything | 60 |
Living in the Antechamber of Hope | 85 |
Giacomo Casanovas Unfailing Luck | 100 |
Half and Half or How to Get Even with the Black Swan | 295 |
GLOSSARY | 301 |
ILearning from Mother Nature the Oldest and the Wisest | 307 |
Do All This Walking or How Systems Become Fragile | 324 |
IIIMargaritas Ante Porcos | 330 |
IVAsperger and the Ontological Black Swan | 339 |
VPerhaps the Most Useful Problem in the History | 347 |
VIThe Fourth Quadrant the Solution to that Most Useful of Problems | 361 |
The Ludic Fallacy or The Uncertainty of the Nerd | 122 |
WE JUST CANT PREDICT | 135 |
How to Look for Bird Poop | 166 |
Epistemocracy a Dream | 191 |
Appelles the Painter or What Do You Do if | 202 |
THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN | 213 |
The Bell Curve That Great Intellectual Fraud | 229 |
The Aesthetics of Randomness | 253 |
86 | 265 |
Lockes Madmen or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places | 274 |
The Uncertainty of the Phony | 286 |
Other editions - View all
The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility" Nassim Nicholas Taleb No preview available - 2010 |
Common terms and phrases
Amioun average believe bell curve Benoît Mandelbrot Black Swan brain called casino cause Chapter confirmation bias consider deviations discuss economic economists effect empirical empiricism epistemic error experience Extremistan fact Fat Tony focus Fooled by Randomness forecast fractal future Gaussian Gaussian bell curve human ice cube idea intellectual knowledge live logic look luck ludic fallacy Mandelbrot mathematicians mathematics matters Matthew Effect Mediocristan methods million mind models Myron Scholes narrative fallacy nature Nobel notion odds past percent person philosopher Platonic Poincaré possible precise predict probability problem problem of induction Psychology randomness rare events risk scalable scientific scientists silent evidence skepticism social someone statistical story Taleb theory things thinkers tion uncertainty understand variables Yevgenia Yogi Berra York