Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent 21 years as a risk taker (quantitative trader) before becoming a flaneur and researcher in philosophical, mathematical and (mostly) practical problems with probability. The book also contains a 4-page glossary 19 pages of notes and, a 28-page bibliography in addition to an index. The Black Swan is a landmark book – itself a black swan. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.Įlegant, startling, and universal in its applications The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. 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.”įor years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know.

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.

For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan so was 9/11. 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 black swan taleb