The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

English language

Published Nov. 5, 2010

ISBN:: 9780679604181

(2 reviews)

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, …

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. 2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"From the Hardcover edition.

18 editions

airdog reviewed The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What a fraud!

2 stars

Did you know that financial forecasters, who are paid a small fortune every year, are totally useless? Yes. It has been proved many times that parrots, crows, dogs and pigs do better or at least as well as them.

Did you know that rare events (what he calls black swans) don't happen often but can have large consequences? Probably.

And to make things much worse, Taleb, being himself the typical example of the Gaussian bell curve, blames the forecasters of being dishonest because they're at worst explicitely dishonest in continuying to be paid for something (using the bell curve) they know is useless. Taleb, being the one among millions failures who succeeded, which is what the bell curve demonstrates very well, writes a book saying that we should get rid of the bell curve.

He's right, but don't write a book about it when you yourself are a case book …

Did you know that financial forecasters, who are paid a small fortune every year, are totally useless? Yes. It has been proved many times that parrots, crows, dogs and pigs do better or at least as well as them.

Did you know that rare events (what he calls black swans) don't happen often but can have large consequences? Probably.

And to make things much worse, Taleb, being himself the typical example of the Gaussian bell curve, blames the forecasters of being dishonest because they're at worst explicitely dishonest in continuying to be paid for something (using the bell curve) they know is useless. Taleb, being the one among millions failures who succeeded, which is what the bell curve demonstrates very well, writes a book saying that we should get rid of the bell curve.

He's right, but don't write a book about it when you yourself are a case book example of it...

Chris Gilmour reviewed The black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Thought it might be my cup of tea, but it isn't

3 stars

I think I just don't like the narrative style. There's interesting things said, great concepts, but the tone, the stories, the framing with anecdotes just makes it a bit of a drag to read. I was on a pop-science reading trip, rattling through half a dozen books in a month until I crashed to a halt with Black Swan and now every time I look at it, I reach for some Scots poetry instead. This book hasn't turned me off pop-science, its just making it hard to go on.