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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)

1,416 ratings

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The most influential book of the past seventy-five years: a groundbreaking exploration of everything we know about what we don't know, now with a new section called "On Robustness and Fragility."

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.

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Product details

Paperback: 480 pages
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group; 2nd ed. edition (11 May 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 081297381X
ISBN-13: 978-0812973815
Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.8 x 20.3 cm
Boxed-product Weight: 358 g
Customer Reviews: 1,416 customer ratings
Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7 in Business Information Management
- #3 in Information Theory
- #1 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 forty-one languages.

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barry

confusing

Reviewed in Australia on 9 June 2020

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Over my head with philosophical jargon

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johannes

Four Stars

Reviewed in Australia on 6 July 2015

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Difficult read but onformative

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Does not fulfill its promise

Reviewed in Australia on 6 January 2018

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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?

Reviewed in Australia on 2 October 2014

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.

6 people found this helpful

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Dr W. H. Konarzewski

Self-indulgent ramble - but amusing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 May 2019

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A 'black swan' event is a significant unexpected event that has huge consequences - such as the banking collapse of 2008 or a terrorist attack such as 9/11. There isn't a great deal to say about 'black swan' events once you've defined them - other than that there's not much you can do to prevent them as they are unpredictable. (And if you do manage to prevent one, no one will know you've prevented it because it didn't happen.)

In the course of 400 pages, Nassim Taleb discourses amusingly and eruditely on black swans and the human reaction to them, which isn't always logical. The most valuable take-away message is that history does not always prepare us for the future - Taleb uses the example of turkeys and Christmas. For a thousand days, the farmer feeds his turkeys and the turkey think he's a kind man who loves turkeys. So when the day of slaughter comes, they get a rude awakening. (Christmas of course being a black swan event for turkeys.)

If you have unlimited time and enjoy philosophical and psychological degressions, and want to know about Taleb's life, you will probably enjoy this book. If your time is limited and you just want to know the essentials about black swans, look elsewhere.

9 people found this helpful

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sweavo

Get to the point.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 4 September 2016

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There's probably a point in here, and I learned a little about the levant, but too ranty and roundabout. Didn't motivate me to finish. Still don't know what it's saying apart from "big, unexpected things have big, unexpected consequences"

28 people found this helpful

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Andreas

Worst book I read for a while

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 February 2019

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I read this book because it was mentioned by Daniel Kahneman in 'Thinking fast and slow'. While the central idea is interesting, the way it is presented is just awful. Nassim Nicolas Taleb does not introduce the topic, except through anecdotes, uses terms before he writes what they actually mean and never really explains how his 'theory' works and the whole thing does not have any structure. The book is full of disrespect for anyone else, except for his closest friends, it is a prime example how to bully others in writing. The author judges the quality of books by their smell, I sadly bough the kindle edition, otherwise the stench would have put me off from buying it.

10 people found this helpful

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Anmol Sarma

Skip the book, listen to a lecture

Reviewed in India on 9 September 2018

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An annoyingly long-winded, insufferably pompous and thoroughly grating account of the disproportionate effects of unforeseen events. Much of the book reads like a self-aggrandizing rant. While there are a few good ideas in the book, it could have easily been cut to a third of its size without losing anything of value. Skip the book and listen to one of Taleb’s lectures instead. Would not recommend.

31 people found this helpful

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Michael

An incredibly thought provoking read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 March 2017

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I am not qualified to comment on the maths and philosophical competence of the author. But he appears to know his stuff. I am reassured by the fact that he made money by trading using his abilities.

As such, it is a refreshing change from the superficial books expressing amazement by journalists or people who have never actually tested their theories in reality.

Assuming he is right, much of modern finance and indeed thinking about highly improbable (but not impossible) events is frighteningly wrong.

For anyone involved in business, investing (stocks, FX, bonds etc) -even if that is just your own pension -this is essential reading.

One of the most thought provoking books I've read for a long time.

10 people found this helpful

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BoltThrower

Don't believe the hype - it's an awful read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2020

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The book got recommended to me by a colleague I respect at work, so I was looking forward to a great read about human misconception and to learn about applying statistical concepts in the right way - at least that was how this book was sold to me. Looking for a compelling narrative and eye-opening examples, what does this book offer? A whole load of apathic drivel, a confusing narrative loaded with wildly thrown around concepts that make any central theme, should it exist, obsolete. From page one to page 93 when I eventually gave up, a very frustrating read which left me angry over my waste of time with this pulp. So why is this a dissappointing read? It's the continuous introduction of non-convincing concepts like "Mediocristan" and "Extremistan", concepts that try very hard to resemble statistical models, an attempt that fails horribly as they are outlandishly disconnected from reality. It is the introduction of a character named Yevgenia Nikolaayevna Krasnova who doesn't exist bare in the imagination of Taleb, and who contributes nothing to the book, leaving a baffled reader behind as she's cited repeatedly throughout the book. It is the exorbitant use of massive headlines like song titles as part of a chapter like "How to avoid watercoolers - Select your brother in-law - Yevgenia's favourite book - What desserts can and cannot deliver - On the avoidance of hope - El desserto de los tartares - The virtues of slow motion" which build an exepectation of snappy nuggets related to the key argument but which all dissappoint as nothing gets explained convingcly or coherently. It is the use of examples that have nothing to do with the average reader - no Nassim Taleb, no one of us "lives in a cramped apartment in East Village Manhattan" and no one works in a laboratory at the Rockefeller University". This academic fug and narcisstic writing is terrible and a waste of time.

One person found this helpful

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David

Some great ideas to tune into - no need to read the whole book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 November 2014

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This is a highly rated book - some putting it in the top ten most influential of the last fifty years! The core concept that everything (our technology, our history, even the fact that life exists on earth) is shaped by 'Black Swan' (low incidence/high impact events) is surely true. This is the best bit of the book and has real impact. It fundamentally shifts the way we think about ourselves in the world - we are fortunate survivors, but then we construct a narrative that somehow it was inevitable that we came to be here today. And of course, all the stuff about financial markets being constructed on the pseudo science of risk modelling and predictability - until in the course of a single day several billion to one events happen. It's important to be familiar with these ideas. What Taleb does, not completely convincingly, is to then construct a fairly rambling book to extrapolate his deep insight into a theory of life and everything. But it doesn't quite work. Life's too short for books that don't quite work. There's plenty more waiting to be read. So I abandoned at half way.

17 people found this helpful

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Cormac T. Garvey

Counteract your own bias and blindspots by reading this and giving serendipity a chance!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 August 2018

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I loved some of the observations about innovation and R&D. so much of innovation is discovery by chance. Serendipity.
This book will really annoy you if you are always totally focused and seek to keep the distractions to an absolute minimum. The book makes a compelling case for being receptive to large random events if and when they happen. Kind of go with the (Tsunami) flow sort of thing. A great read on asymmetry in modern life once again. Why is it we only hear about the successful startup stories , and never the lessons learned from the 99 failures that would be much more useful ??!! This book provides some insight.

One person found this helpful

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Martin

You could easily find a great synthesis of this concepts on Kahneman's ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 November 2017

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The book could be twice as clear and half as long without compromising accuracy.
The original thinking is important and enlightening but anyone capable of such gibberish does not deserve the attention this book demands.
You could easily find a great synthesis of this concepts on Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow' or Tahleb's 'Missbehaving' and miss nothing of importance.

3 people found this helpful

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Klaus

Old wine in new skins

Reviewed in Germany on 13 June 2019

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I'll save you the purchase and reading of this overly hyped pamphlet, so here's the author's main message: "I am so smart. Everyone else is an idiot. The end." The rest is just old wine in new skins to anyone who has more than half a brain and has ever attended an introductory statistics course, even if the author's tongue-in-cheek references to professions that use quantitative analysis (which quickly become boring, dull or outright derogatory) want you to think otherwise.

18 people found this helpful

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Tatiana

Very intelligent

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 August 2019

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I love this book so much that I bought a copy as a gift! Everyone I know from London City has read at least this book, but many people have read all Taleb's books. It doesn't mean you need to be a hedge fund manager (I'm not!), the book is a great perspective-changing exercise for anyone looking outside the box.

One person found this helpful

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Richard Atkinson

Is the Black Swan....a Black Swan?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 13 February 2014

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So how do you define a book that is basically saying that everything you think about the potential for the pear shaped to happen to you at some point in the future is wrong?

Well lets start with the tone of the book.

It is agressively written, which is both entertaining and keeps your attention....the French seem to get a bit of a kicking now and then. It just sounds like the written frustratyion of someone who has is a Lighthouse keeper marking the Danger while the ships just keep sailing past onto the rocks.

It is clearly brilliantly researched and referenced and is obviously a complete labour of love, which make the reader want to love the ideas also.

There is no doubt that it is not a straight forward read there is an enormous amount packed into 350 odd pages but it is worth the time and effort to grasp the ideas that NNT is try to get across.

The biggest issue though is not the reading….or the eventual agreeing with what is written it is the putting into practical effect what is being suggested….it is the complete change in mind set to risk and predictability that is easy to read about and affirm but I suspect really much more difficult to put in place in your daily dealings.

However it is going to be fun trying…..i recommend you have a read and have a try also.

Perhaps the biggest thing about the book Black Swan is that perhaps it can be considered its own Black Swan…..is this book its own “highly improbable consequential event”?

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Conpolis

An important book to read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 July 2019

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No exactly the easiest read (especially the concluding chapters are quite hard to follow) but provides very valuable insights in the field of prediction and forecasting (not just relevant for the economics industry). It paints a rather grim picture as far as randomness and its ramifications are concerned as well as dealing with the so called "expertise" in various fields.

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Daniel Rozman

For the FT Subscriber

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 April 2014

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Sometimes it is claimed that those who write and profess about their successes, do so with the benefit of their supplementary publishing income. Often I perceive those kinds of comments are snide or unfair. But not in the case of Nassim Taleb, who has benefited from the class of reader who buys their books based upon recommendations made by the FT Weekend.

The book…well it makes one point, and then beats it to death, leaving the reader anxious to anticipate every future 'black swan' not appreciating that by calling it out is like observing the quantum wave function - i.e. it disperses. Or, if a tail event does come to pass, any failings which ought to aportion accountability are brushed off by those responsible, they cry 'oh, but it was a black swan event.'

A LITTLE information can be a very dangerous thing.

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Jonathan D.

Very readable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 February 2020

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Written in a style that reminds me of Neitsche, but humorous. Like all good philosophy books, there are times when I had to stop for a moment in order to grasp the concept being put forward.
The menu has a delicious starter, main course and small desert. All of which can be savoured, rather than wolfed down.
What did you expect?

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