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The Black Swan:The Impact of the Highly Improbable |
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Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Publisher: Random House
Category: Book
List Price: $26.95
Buy New: $15.17
You Save: $11.78 (44%)
New (56) Used (22) Collectible (1) from $11.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  171 reviews
Sales Rank: 79
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4
ISBN: 1400063515
Dewey Decimal Number: 003.54
EAN: 9781400063512
ASIN: 1400063515
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: ALL BOOKS ARE BRAND NEW
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan,
in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and
unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and
enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way
you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a
delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human
nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson
 Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired
to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers
most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature."
Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature."
Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid
shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're
still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not
statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to
explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The
truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any
given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly
simplified, if not flat out wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable,
he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future.
Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it's something
each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a
seat belt.
The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too
much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying
to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable
chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events
are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a
reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe
all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are
white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific
truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to
calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found
Cygnus atratus in Australia.
Nassim argues that most of the
really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus
trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be
emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is
one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts
it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the
bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our
world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."
In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my
comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the
world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how
many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level
with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of
human nature. --Chris Anderson
Book Description
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.
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