num_pages: 366
description: 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. 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.The book also contains a 4-page glossary; 19 pages of notes; and, a 28-page bibliography in addition to an index.
language: English
title: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
titlecomplete: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
characters: Myron Scholes, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Goldstein, Plato, Friedrich Hayek, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Karl Marx, Kurt Gödel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Robert C. Merton, Spyros Makridakis, Mark Spitznagel, Al-Ghazali, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Yogi Berra, Aristotle (philosopher), Robert K. Merton, Giacomo Casanova, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, John Maynard Keynes, Ibn Khaldoun, Michel de Montaigne, Paul Samuelson, Catherine the Great, Frédéric Bastiat, Menodotus of Nicomedia, Amos Tversky, Henri Poincaré, Andrey Kolmogorov, Arnold Toynbee, Philip Tetlock (1954), Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, Sextus Empiricus, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, Francis Bacon (philosopher), Karl Popper, Benoit Mandelbrot, Umberto Eco, Bertrand Russell, Edward Norton Lorenz, Ben Bernanke
genres: Mathematics, Finance, History, Philosophy, Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Business, Science, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 108804
places: Amioun
series: Incerto
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Financial Times Business Book of the Year
category: Shortlist
publisher: Random House