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.
