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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" Paperback – 11 May 2010

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Author)

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The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.

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 explains everything we know about what we don’t know, 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.

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the 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. The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.

Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“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

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Product details

Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group; 2 edition (11 May 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 081297381X
ISBN-13: 978-0812973815
Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.4 x 20.1 cm
Boxed-product Weight: 358 g
Average Customer Review: 3 customer reviews
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 34,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Developmental Biology (Books)
- #16 in Information Theory
- #3 in Information Science

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Review

Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"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

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 flâneur meditating in cafés, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”—that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.

Taleb’s books have been published in thirty-three languages.

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johannes

Four Stars

6 July 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Difficult read but onformative

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Amazon Customer

Does not fulfill its promise

6 January 2018

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Some grest ideas are swamped by too much waffle and sloppiness., his whimsy is annoying rather than engaging. I cannot see how he gets rave reviews even discounting the presentation as many ideas are not as original as he seems to think. I couldn't finish it.

2 people found this helpful

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Prediction is Uncertain - Even Behavioral Consistency?

2 October 2014

Format: Kindle Edition

Imagine you are a turkey being fed comfortably on one of those mass production turkey farms. You may well assume that the good food, good company, and pleasant surroundings will go on forever. If you are a quant-savvy turkey, you might even gobble together a mathematical model that predicts good times well into the future, beyond not just Thanksgiving, but past Christmas and New Years as well. Suddenly in November, unexpectedly, with life-changing consequences...things change. You just didn't see it coming. Pass the cranberry sauce.

Financial planners, economists and other more sophisticated turkeys don't see it coming either, argues author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His book highlights the danger of the unexpected. The unexpected will happen even if we have a comfortable model predicting only minor changes. After such a "black swan" catches us by surprise, we use our flawed hindsight to decide how we could have predicted the disaster using a better model. We are kidding ourselves, insists Taleb. We need better strategies to live in a world where truly random, unpredictable events occur. He goes to some trouble in this book, and his previous Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, to educate us.

The flawed basis of many formal models is "the great intellectual fraud" of the bell curve. We learn that highly constrained variables like height and weight cluster around an average and that extreme variations from the average are unlikely. We just aren't going to meet anybody that's half a foot or half a mile tall. These "Mediocristan" models are fine until we misapply their assumptions to unconstrained "Extremistan" phenomena like stock values, book sales and such. We are slow to see this problem. We persistently commit the "Ludic Fallacy," clinging to our formal models because they seem more real to us than the messy, real-world events they are meant to explain. Taleb illustrates this point with examples ranging from the events of 9/11 to the "off model" problems that cost casinos money. S. I. Hyakawa warned us in the early `70s that "the map is not the territory," but we haven't learned.

Taleb also warns us of the narrative fallacy based on our love of stories. We feel we understand something when we can tell a story about why it happened--even after the fact, with only part of the relevant information. When musicians achieve fame and dramatic financial success, we backtrack through their histories, explaining success by what we see along the path. We don't see the hidden cemetery of failed garage bands and starving artists who did all the same things to no avail. Because we believe this artificial story, we don't have to face the role of randomness in success or failure. Or consider its impact on our own plans.

Taleb offers some suggestions--though fewer than I'd hoped for. He advises us to be open to positive black swans and guard against negative ones. Lending money at interest, for example, opens us only to a high impact negative. This worst case is that the borrower will go bankrupt and we won't get our money back. But the very best outcome is that the loan will be simply repaid. If the borrower's entrepreneurial effort is wildly, off-the-scale successful, the lender doesn't get any more than this. An investor, on the other hand, suffers the same risk of loss, but participates fully in an "Extemistan" success. Readers are left to ponder the implications--and perhaps to hire Taleb as an investment consultant.

Although Taleb does not venture there, some of his ideas are useful in applied psychology. Personnel tests, for example, rely on the principle of "behavioral consistency," assuming that our past actions best predict our future actions. If someone is a poor performer, the safe bet is that this person will perform poorly in future employment. This may be fit a general model, but employers--and psychologists who advise them--might consider whether we commit Taleb's fallacies. Are we so comfortable with are general predictive models, with our stories about how people "are," that we close ourselves to possible change? Wouldn't it be better to seek the occasional "gray swan" of improvement and hire the flawed job applicant? The author has convinced me that this is worth considering. My time reading this book was well spent.

One final note: The author's condescending tone has been mentioned by other reviewers. It's there all right. Yes, he is condescending. Yes, he sneers at his fellow financial analysts. Yes, his citations veer into name dropping. And, yes, he finds ways to not-so-subtly complement himself as he praises Benoit Mandelbrot. But none of this matters. Taleb's message is valuable. I recommend you ignore his tone--or perhaps even be entertained by it. Stay on task and learn something about the nature of randomness and prediction.

4 people found this helpful

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Amazon.com: 1,332 reviews

Prolix prognosticator

Too demeaning of others--even if they might deserve some blame for things

15 June 2018 - Published on Amazon.com

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Already lots of reviews on this work but I have an additional thought or two. I would have liked to have given this book a higher rating but Dr. Taleb's incessant jibes at mathematicians, economists, those working withing the financial markets, and even biologists (!!!) quickly gets VERY old. There are sections where every single page has some reference to this field or that which, in his estimation, is populated by nothing but the village idiots.

I can certainly understand him taking exception with those who have, at least in the lead up to 2008, steered us onto the financial rocks, but his beating of the same drum gets quickly stale. Here I think of the maxim that at some point you have to fix the problem and not the blame. This book could have been a hundred pages shorter--perhaps a 20,000 word piece of long-form journalism.

He also drifts to and fro quite a bit in his writing. While I truly enjoy his erudition and a touch of the circumlocution, this work would have been much better served if he had kept to the task at hand.

There are a couple of redeeming aspects to his effort however. His admonition that it is better to prepare than it is to predict are wise words in any walk of life and here he frames them nicely.

Also, in the epilogue he lists his "Ten principles for a black swan robust society." These are wonderful admonitions such as society should not socialize the losses and privatize the gains. Capitalism is about rewards and punishments not just rewards is another good point. This short section is well worth your time.

I also liked his introduction to the reader of the concept of iatrogenics--making sure no lasting harm is done while trying to help.

This would have worked much better in 20K words and without the snide comments regarding others and their fields of study. I think an admonishment that fits here is the "play the ball not the man."

Neal Schier - June 2018

83 people found this helpful

Roger D. Williams

A Modern Masterwork

28 February 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

Verified Purchase

The first book that I read in the four-volume "Incerto" set by Nassim Kaleb was "Antifragile," so my reading of "The Black Swan" is out of sequence. However, I am glad that I came to it in its second edition, with footnotes addressing some of the criticisms made of it (tip: flip to the footnote as soon as you come across the symbol identifying it rather reading on to the end of the chapter where they are listed). While highly relevant to the dismal science of economics, it is far from a dismal tome. Some of the anecdotes will have you chuckling or even laughing out loud! It is a highly stimulating and entertaining book and will particularly delight those who enjoy the debunking of wrong-headed purveyors of elaborate academic theories that are not just useless but actually harmful. If this sounds like a book you might enjoy, be aware that the four-volume Incerto series is available as a set, something I found out too late to profit from the knowledge. I intend to purchase the other two volumes and recommend the set. His treatment of the devastating events known as Black Swans ought to be required reading for all who would like to avoid causing or experiencing them.

40 people found this helpful

Ronald A. Elling

Read the postscript in the 2nd edition and you won't need anything else

20 March 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

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A must have read. Definitely get the second edition. The "postscript essay" is the most valuable part of the whole book. You have to slog your way through endless invectives in edition one, but the postscript in edition two ties it all together in a tight presentation. Excellent work that I came to through "The Signal and the Noise".

33 people found this helpful

Reasonable Reviewer

An everyman's approach to a very subtle topic

13 December 2017 - Published on Amazon.com

Verified Purchase

This is both an interesting book from the topic, how we tend to misinterpret and miss highly unlikely events, but also it is a statement to human resilience based on Mr. Taleb's history in emigrating from Lebanon. His views of the world are consistently positive and upbeat. Many of us could learn a lot from Nassim Taleb.

The book covers both the math as well as the narrative intuition for understanding rare events and why we tend to underestimate both their frequency and effects on our best laid plans.

The book is full of hundreds of great examples, and it is written in a very approachable style.

Whether you are a hard core statistician or just someone interested in statistics, this is a great book for you.

14 people found this helpful

Ron Piekaar

Am I really a Black Swan? Says who?

19 March 2018 - Published on Amazon.com

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I am not smart enough to estimate the number of people who have been given the capacity to look at the world from an entirely unique and yet vital perspective, but Nassim Taleb is definitely one of them. The insights that come to him naturally, if studied and adapted by the average person into their own thought processes, would go a long way toward advancing the enlightenment of our species in general. When Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge, it may have been Nassin Taleb that he had in mind. That said, I do take issue with his final statement that implied that because our existence represents, in his opinion, a one in a 180-400 billion odds of our not being alive, depending on the sperm count of the father. Who says? Do we really know for sure that each of those 180-400 billion sperm are entirely and distinctly different from each other in any discernible way? Are sperm like snow flakes, each identifiably unique? What if every individual sperm was identical to the others in its group? Consider identical twins; two sperm, two identical individuals. And if triplets or quintuplets, or even sextuplets are seemingly different from each other, is it the sperm, or is it perhaps the ova that has introduced the dissimilarity? In the one case, a black swan no doubt. In the other, a very predictable distinction.

11 people found this helpful