The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a New Section: On Robustness and Fragility

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400063515
• ISBN13: 9781400063512
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

To Expect the Unexpected

It's a rare book that makes you look at the world differently. The Black Swan enhances our awareness of our skewed way of viewing reality and the damage that can cause. Taleb focuses on one kind of bias: our penchant to forget the improbable. Rare events with big impact, here represented by the black swan, are easy to ignore until they happen. Because they don't show up for long periods, the risk is invisible--out of sight, out of mind. As he demonstrated with his earlier Fooled by Randomness, Taleb has an exceptional ability to ground abstract ideas in concrete examples, some from his own experience as quant, derivatives trader and hedge fund manager, but also from other aspects of life. The civil war that descended upon his family in Lebanon, a place where ethnic groups lived together in amity for a century, makes a vivid illustration. His well-to-do and politically connected relatives were sure that that the conflict would end in a matter of days; instead it lasted 17 years. While the book is mostly a demonstration of our cognitive failings, it also contains a quirky but useful how-to manual for dealing with an unpredictable world where huge consequences can follow from tiny differences. Chapter 13, with a title that starts "Appelles the Painter", explains what to do when you don't know what will come. Entertaining as they are, chapter headings like "How to Look for Bird Poop" don't help the reader navigate what is an unconventional, nonlinear format. While it bristles with intriguing ideas, the book as a whole is not easy to grasp, as those familiar with Mr. Taleb's style from Fooled by Randomness will know. Each piece is powerfully engaging, but the entire argument is more elusive. But being forced to figure it out is no bad thing and along the way one laughs at the absurdities of fate and humanity.