The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

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Random House Publishing Group, 17. apr. 2007 - 480 strani
The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and The Bed of Procrustes.

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 explains everything we know about what we don’t know, 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.
 
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.
 
Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb
 
“The most prophetic voice of all.”—GQ
 
Praise for The Black Swan
 
“[A book] that altered modern thinking.”The Times (London)
 
“A masterpiece.”—Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail
 
“Idiosyncratically brilliant.”—Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times
 
The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate
 
“[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne. . . . We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias [and] narrative fallacy.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“Hugely enjoyable—compelling . . . easy to dip into.”Financial Times
 
“Engaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review


From the Hardcover edition.
 

Vsebina

UMBERTO ECOS ANTILIBRARY OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION
1
Yevgenias Black Swan
23
One Thousand and One Days or How Not to Be a Sucker
38
Confirmation Shmonfirmation
51
The Narrative Fallacy
62
Living in the Antechamber of Hope
85
Human Nature Happiness and Lumpy Rewards
91
Giacomo Casanovas Unfailing Luck
100
GLOSSARY
301
ILearning from Mother Nature the Oldest and the Wisest
307
Do All This Walking or How Systems Become Fragile
324
IIIMargaritas Ante Porcos
330
IVAsperger and the Ontological Black Swan
339
VPerhaps the Most Useful Problem in the History
347
VIThe Fourth Quadrant the Solution to that Most Useful of Problems
361
VIIWhat to Do with the Fourth Quadrant
367

The Ludic Fallacy or The Uncertainty of the Nerd
122
WE JUST CANT PREDICT
135
How to Look for Bird Poop
165
Epistemocracy a Dream
190
Appelles the Painter or What Do You Do if
201
THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
213
The Bell Curve That Great Intellectual Fraud
229
The Aesthetics of Randomness
253
The Logic of Fractal Randomness with a Warning
262
Lockes Madmen or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places
274
The Uncertainty of the Phony
286
Half and Half or How to Get Even with the Black Swan
295
VIIIThe Ten Principles for a BlackSwanRobust Society
374
NOTES
381
BIBLIOGRAPHY
401
26
411
86
414
2222233338
420
87
423
45
427
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE FIRST EDITION
431
48
437
89
441
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O avtorju (2007)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to problems of uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. He spent nearly two decades as a businessman and quantitative trader before becoming a full-time philosophical essayist and academic researcher in 2006. Although he spends most of his time in the intense seclusion of his study, or as a flâneur meditating in cafés, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute. His main subject matter is “decision making under opacity”—that is, a map and a protocol on how we should live in a world we don’t understand.
 
Taleb’s books have been published in thirty-three languages.


From the Hardcover edition.

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