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The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
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Sales rank 597
Customers rating (based on 510 reviews)
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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"
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| Publisher | Random House | | Release date | 04/2007 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
| | List price | $28 | | Our price | $18.48 (you save 34.00%) | | Used price | from $9.08 |
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 Gets you thinking...but a bit boring at times
Amazing book that has some great views on the world. The book is kind of depressing if you have invested your life into finance or economics. But if you think about some of the ideas that he has, you will look at the business world in a much more different light.
Bad parts: LOTS of references to obscure and dead sociologists. It's OK if he tells what their idea was and explains it, but often he just says a name or a book and assumes that you have read it or heard of the person.
Overall the book is a must read for any economics, finance, psychology or business person. There are some parts that can be skipped over if boring, but at the heart of it, the book will change how you look at life.
 Applied mathematics meets philosophy
Dusted this masterpiece off and re-read it again due to the market uncertainties. Times like this everyone has an opinion, but no one has a clue. Taleb's unique background, being a student of randomness, a Wharton MBA, and a former derivatives trader at a hedge fund provides the perfect backdrop for analytical thought in moments of fear and sheer speculation.
These current chaotic financial fears breaths truth in so many statements he makes in Black Swan. I'd highly recommend people pick up a copy for keeping themselves grounded and reducing the urge to make rash decisions. The main thesis is to persuade people to understand the past does not predict the future - aberrations occur that destroy our deeply seated logic and certainty of the ways things should react to uncertainty, but suddenly don't.
All in all, a fascinating, timeless treatise from a philosophical point of view and market based one.
A book that provoke your thought
This book is very opinionated but it provide a lot of provocative insights, one of few book that shake your conventional belief on the subject of capital market.
 A little knowledge is a dangerous thing
Only a limo driver (without belittleing the trade) would use induction outside a formal system, or apply Gauss distribution to a single observation, although to be fair the author gives warning about reading chapter 15 with its confused discussion of the normal distribution. Overall entertaining and to be recommended, but not to be taken too seriously.
 A book too far
This is a book of 366 pages which tries to communicate the following thought: The future is unpredictable, and one big reason it's unpredictable is that unexpected events occur which are unforeseeable. These events are called black swans. If a good editor had edited this book, the book could have been cut to 50 pages. An even better editor would have cut the book to 10 pages. This book is essentially a one page magazine article for which Nassim Taleb got a book deal to expand the gist of the article to 366 pages. The writing is unfocused, wandering, disjointed, unconnected, and of a style one might call stream-of-conscious. This reviewer couldn't get through more than half of the book before he felt that reading the last half would be a boring, waste of time. This book was purchased through Amazon, and the purchase demonstrates the downside of buying a book based upon media reputation but, sight unseen.
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