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Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"
Random House | 2007 | ISBN: 1400063515 | 336 pages | siPDF | 6.8 MB
A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principalcharacteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and,after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear lessrandom, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success ofGoogle was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, blackswans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise ofreligions to events in our own personal lives.
Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until afterthey occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans arehardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused ongeneralities. We concentrate on things we already know and time andtime again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are,therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable tothe impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enoughto rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”
For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking weknow more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to theirrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surpriseus and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explainseverything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisinglysimple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swanwill change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastlyentertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories totell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitivescience to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.
Amazon.com Review
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration ofrandomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan,in which he examines the influence of highly improbable andunpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging andenlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the wayyou think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "adelightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of humannature."
From Booklist
In business and government, major money is spent on prediction.Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing toMBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living fromeconomic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with acause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statisticalconcepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressiveenergy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleefuldiatribes, on why experts are wrong. They neglect Taleb's metaphor of"the black swan," whose discovery invalidated the theory that all swansare white. Taleb rides this manifestation of the unpredicted event intoa range of phenomena, such as why a book becomes a best-seller or howan entrepreneur becomes a billionaire, taking pit stops withphilosophers who have addressed the meaning of the unexpected andconfounding. Taleb projects a strong presence here that will temptoutside-the-box thinkers into giving him a look.
Contents
| Prologue Part One: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, Or How We Seek Validation 1 The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic 2 Yevgenia's Black Swan 3 The Speculator and the Prostitute 4 One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 5 Confirmation Shmonfirmation! 6 The Narrative Fallacy 7 Living in the Antechamber of Hope 8 Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence 9 The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd Part Two: We Just Can't Predict From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré 10 The Scandal of Prediction 11 How to Look for Bird Poop 12 Epistemocracy, a Dream 13 Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict? Part Three: Those Gray Swans Of Extremistan 14 From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back 15 The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud 16 The Aesthetics of Randomness 17 Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places 18 The Uncertainty of the Phony Part Four: The End 19 Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans Acknowledgments Glossary Notes Bibliography Index About the Author About the Type |
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