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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a New Section: On Robustness and Fragility: 2 Paperback – 1 January 1900
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.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication date1 January 1900
- Dimensions13.21 x 2.77 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-10081297381X
- ISBN-13978-0812973815
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- Incerto: Fooled by Randomness, the Black Swan, the Bed of Procrustes, AntifragileNassim Nicholas Taleb PH.D. MBAPaperback
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Review
"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
About the Author
Taleb's books have been published in forty-one languages.
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Product details
- Publisher : Random House Trade; 2nd ed. edition (1 January 1900)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 081297381X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0812973815
- Dimensions : 13.21 x 2.77 x 20.32 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 28,527 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 2 in Information Science
- 9 in Information Theory
- 11 in Developmental Biology (Books)
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About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent more than two decades as a risk taker before becoming a full-time essayist and scholar focusing on practical, philosophical, and mathematical problems with chance, luck, and probability. His focus in on how different systems handle disorder.
He now spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés. In addition to his life as a trader he spent several years as an academic researcher (12 years as Distinguished Professor at New York University's School of Engineering, Dean's Professor at U. Mass Amherst).
He is the author of the Incerto (latin for uncertainty), accessible in any order (Skin in the Game, Antifragile, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes, and Fooled by Randomness) plus a technical version, The Technical Incerto (Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails). Taleb has also published close to 55 academic and scholarly papers as a backup, technical footnotes to the Incerto in topics ranging from Statistical Physics and Quantitative Finance to Genetics and International affairs. The Incerto has more than 200 translations in 41 languages.
Taleb believes that prizes, honorary degrees, awards, and ceremonialism debase knowledge by turning it into a spectator sport.
""Imagine someone with the erudition of Pico de la Mirandola, the skepticism of Montaigne, solid mathematical training, a restless globetrotter, polyglot, enjoyer of fine wines, specialist of financial derivatives, irrepressible reader, and irascible to the point of readily slapping a disciple." La Tribune (Paris)
A giant of Mediterranean thought ... Now the hottest thinker in the world", London Times
"The most prophetic voice of all" GQ
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