E-Book Overview
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a book by the essayist, scholar and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It was released on April 17, 2007 by Random House. The book focuses on the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively. This theory has since become known as the black swan theory. The book also covers subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, and ways of life, and uses elements of fiction in making its points. The first edition appeared in 2007 and was a commercial success. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
E-Book Content
THE
B L A C K SWAN
The
HIGHLY
I mpact
IM
of
the
PROBABLE
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
U.S.A. $26.95 Canada $34.95
is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpre dictable; 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 / 1 1 . For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. A
BLACK
SWAN
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 oppor tunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can