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 … 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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I really enjoyed this book. Nassim Taleb makes a great case for not modeling and viewing the world through a Gaussian statistics lens. Instead we are in the world black swan events, or Extremistan as he calls it. Where the highly improbably and unpredictable events are what shape the world. Recommended read for anyone interested in business, economics and similar topics.
@DougE this is the book I was talking about over lunch. Its a great way to remind yourself that absolutes almost always break down.
Thought provoking and quite interesting. This book must be read slowly and with deliberation because it insists that you screw your head on a bit differently in order to grasp its concepts. Black Swans are totally unanticipated large scale events with huge results. Think 9/11; unexpected, shocking, and reverberating right up to today and beyond. Probability is a joke, the bell curve concept a waste of time in the real world. How does one “prepare” for the Black Swans? Do we merely prepare to cope with the unknown unknown.
Read this book, study the message and I think you will look at the world much differently. You may cancel your newspaper and stop wasting time with the nightly news!
As I think back at the year 2016 and the presidential elections I believe that Trump’s election was a Black Swan; unanticipated, shocking, statistically impossible. Reverberations from this event will be felt far into our countries future. I will leave it up to you whether those reverberations will be good or bad, but know that they will occur.
If I was teaching a course in life, philosophy, economics, motivation, or psychology, this would be a mandatory textbook. I avoid pretty wide swaths of the Business section – have read too many expanded magazine articles with one basic idea on Page 150 – but this gem rises head and shoulders above the rest. The opening paragraph explains how the entire Western world thought all swans were white… until a black swan was spotted. He defines black swan events as events which 1) are disproportionately huge, 2) cannot be predicted, and 3) are mistakenly explained in retrospect with hindsight and fallacies. Examples range from 9/11 to “how you met your spouse.” The book is just absolutely exploding with ideas and reality-shattering views and carries the feeling of being written in “blue collar” language by one of the brightest economics / chaos / risk theory minds in the world. Occasionally the book can be too sprawling or chaotic seeming itself but think of this read as a wild roller coaster, not a slow and straight drive. Absolutely life changing.
I first read Black Swan right around the time of the 2016 presidential election and it provided me with a way to describe the election of Donald Trump, a genuine example of a black swan event if there ever was one, to clients and people in my personal life who were really struggling with accepting the reality of that election.
a lot of good information
Mildly entertaining.
An excellent book that explains our lack of planning for lower probability, but very high risk events. Important especially considering how these events seem to be happening more often.
Thought,. provoking! Could adapt the concept to a multitude of events. So smart!
One of the most important books I’ve ever read in my life.
This book is, in not too many words, a work of art. Taleb rubbed the crust off our eyes in the gentlest of ways. If you’re looking to boost yourself mentally or psychologically, this is the book for you.
Thought provoking. Changes your thinking.
Forces an acceptance of unpredictability.
An excellent book about risk and probability. The author is very eloquent and an original thinker! I really enjoyed this book.
This is a book that changed the way I look at the world. Although it is not easy to read, it is extremely informative and interesting.
It changed my perspective of the world around me. Thank you Mr Taleb.
A fascinating journey into the philosophy of random surprises. We like to think we can predict the future but often it’s an illusion. The book was great for stimulating thinking in areas often avoided.
What an original thinker!
What an impressively thought out approach to looking at the world in a totally new light, and providing told fire dealing with it in a more realistic way.
The author is concerned with rare and unpredictable events, also he strongly believes the gaussian is overused. Probably true, but so many pages to say it. His discussion of Mendlebrot mathematics is weak and his comments on Quantum Mechanics show that he has very little understanding of it.
Interesting premise, but wow does the author go on and on.