The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility" (Unabridged)
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4.2 • 186 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
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.
Includes a bonus pdf of tables and figures.
Customer Reviews
Excellent read
Thought provoking and perspective framing.
Overkill.
So, I started listening to Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Black Swan audiobook, and at first, I was like, “This is cool!” It’s about how rare, unexpected events can turn everything upside down, and the future’s just too wild to predict. I was into it. But a few chapters in, I was like, “Okay, got it.” Taleb makes his point, that life’s messy and we’re not that smart about it, then keeps repeating it. I kept going, hoping for something fresh, but he just threw in long philosophical rants and big words instead of new ideas. I’m thinking, “Dude, I’m sold, enough already!” It got old, like he was stretching the same thought too far. Halfway through, I shut it off, not mad, just done, since I’d already heard the best part.
Read this gem years ago.
I read this book years ago. Loved it. Taleb is a star.