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The Black Swan: Second Edition
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.
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Reviews
Fat Tony thinks your “fair coin” that came up heads 99 times in a row is bogus. If it comes up tails next, pizza and beer’s on him alright? Don’t be a sucker. Be more like Fat Tony.
By pmassx
The author is obviously very intelligent and he implies it in his book clearly. However, the thoughts and concepts are not presented very clearly. New concepts come randomly and unexplained. Couldn’t continue after 100 pages.
By firo0001
disclaimer: this is a review about this digital edition and not of the book this edition is a nightmare to highlight in
By Stickycover
Bought this on audiobook today it will be my fourth reading, I first read this book back when it was first published. It’s groundbreaking work that should make us all inspect and re-evaluate all of our approaches to risk and uncertainty and think best with how we are best prepared for the unforeseen and high-impact events that conventional models either assign an incorrect probability or the type of event is simply unforeseeable (aka the “Turkey Problem”). This works on all levels so there are lessons to be found for us all as individuals, parents, families … governments. This book is not for those who benefit from government bailouts!
By Atari_Silverlake
Interesting book with a few good takeaways and original ideas. Could be much shorter though. There are some topics where the author is trying to be too bombastic/outlandish but that’s understandable- the book sells better that way. Also, his obsession with being against the Gaussian distribution becomes a little irritating later in the book- he just keeps repeating himself.
By archilny