List Books » The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility")
Authors: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
ISBN-13: 9780812973815, ISBN-10: 081297381X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: May 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, uncertainty, probability, and knowledge. Part literary essayist, part empiricist, part no-nonsense mathematical trader, he is currently taking a break as Dean’s Professor in the Sciences of Uncertainty at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His last book, the bestseller Fooled by Randomness, has been published in nineteen languages. Taleb lives mostly in New York.
A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we—especially the experts—are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.
*2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"
The hubris of predictionsand our perpetual surprise when the not-predicted happensare themes of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's engaging new book, The Black Swan. It concerns the occurrence of the improbable, the power of rare events and the author's lament that "in spite of the empirical record we continue to project into the future as if we were good at it." We expect all swans to be white and are shocked when a black swan swims by.