The Black Swan

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 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.

Table of Contents

PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION 

Chapter 1: The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic 

Chapter 2: Yevgenia’s Black Swan 

Chapter 3: The Speculator and the Prostitute 

Chapter 4: One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker 

Chapter 5: Confirmation Shmonfirmatlon! 

Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy 

Chapter 7: Living In the Antechamber of Hope 

Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova’s Unfalling Luck: The Problem of SIient Evidence 

Chapter 9: The Ludie Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd 

PART TWO: WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT 

Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction 

Chapter 11: How to Look for Bird Poop 

Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream 

Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict? 

PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN 

Chapter 14: From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back 

Chapter 15: The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud 

Chapter 16: The Aesthetics of Randomness 

Chapter 17: Locke’s Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places 

Chapter 18: The Uncertainty of the Phony 

PART FOUR: THE END 

Chapter 19: Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan 

About the Author

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.