num_pages: 256
description: A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal 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. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.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.
language: English
title: The Black Swan and the Logic of Risk Bearing
titlecomplete: The Black Swan and the Logic of Risk Bearing
characters: Al-Ghazali, Menodotus of Nicomedia, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibn Khaldoun, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Frédéric Bastiat, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Aristotle (philosopher), Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philip Tetlock (1954), Karl Popper, Amos Tversky, Catherine the Great, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Bertrand Russell, Sextus Empiricus, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Robert K. Merton, Michel de Montaigne, Ben Bernanke, Mark Spitznagel, Henri Poincaré, Giacomo Casanova, Arnold Toynbee, Karl Marx, Yogi Berra, Andrey Kolmogorov, John Maynard Keynes, Umberto Eco, Daniel Kahneman, Robert C. Merton, Friedrich Hayek, Paul Samuelson, Spyros Makridakis, Charles Darwin, Francis Bacon (philosopher), Dan Goldstein, Kurt Gödel, Edward Norton Lorenz, Myron Scholes, Benoit Mandelbrot
genres: Sociology, Psychology, History, Science, Economics, Philosophy, Mathematics, Finance, Business, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 108807
places: Amioun
series: Incerto
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Financial Times Business Book of the Year
category: Shortlist
publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc