A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yetcauses massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Talebshows in a playful way that black swan events explain almost everything aboutour world.
A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yetcauses massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Talebshows in a playful way that black swan events explain almost everything aboutour world.
The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we donโt know, now with a new section calledย โOn Robustness and Fragility.โ
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.
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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 donโt 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 โimpossible.โ
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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, Talebย will change the way you look at the world, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, โOn Robustness and Fragility,โ 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.ย Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications,ย The Black Swanย is a landmark bookโitself a black swan.
“"The Black Swanchanged my view of how the world works."-Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate ”
Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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โThe most prophetic voice of all.โโGQ
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Praise for The Black Swan
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โ[A book] that altered modern thinking.โโThe Times (London)
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โA masterpiece.โโChris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail
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โIdiosyncratically brilliant.โโNiall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times
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โThe Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.โโDaniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate
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โ[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.โโThe Wall Street Journal
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โHugely enjoyableโcompelling . . . easy to dip into.โโFinancial Times
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โEngaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.โโThe New York Times Book Review
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flรขneur meditating in cafรฉs, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York Universityโs Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is โdecision making under opacityโโthat is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we donโt understand.
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Talebโs books have been published in forty-one languages.
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