The Black Swan: Second Edition by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Paperback, 9780812973815 | Buy online at The Nile
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The Black Swan: Second Edition

The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb   Series: Incerto

Paperback

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.

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Summary

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.

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Description

The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we donโ€™t know, now with a new section calledย โ€œOn 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 donโ€™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 โ€œimpossible.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, โ€œOn 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 bookโ€”itself a black swan.

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Critic Reviews

“"The Black Swanchanged my view of how the world works."-Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate ”

Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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โ€œThe most prophetic voice of all.โ€โ€”GQ
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Praise for The Black Swan
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โ€œ[A book] that altered modern thinking.โ€โ€”The Times (London)
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โ€œA masterpiece.โ€โ€”Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail
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โ€œIdiosyncratically brilliant.โ€โ€”Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times
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โ€œThe Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.โ€โ€”Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate
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โ€œ[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.โ€โ€”The Wall Street Journal
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โ€œHugely enjoyableโ€”compelling . . . easy to dip into.โ€โ€”Financial Times
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โ€œEngaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.โ€โ€”The New York Times Book Review

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About the Author

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 Universityโ€™s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is โ€œdecision making under opacityโ€โ€”that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we donโ€™t understand.
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Talebโ€™s books have been published in forty-one languages.

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Product Details

Publisher
Random House USA Inc | Random House Inc
Published
11th May 2010
Edition
10002nd
Pages
480
ISBN
9780812973815

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