The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"

Incerto, Book 2

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Narrated by: Joe Ochman

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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.

Includes a bonus pdf of tables and figures.

Critic reviews

Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“The most prophetic voice of all.”—GQ

Praise for The Black Swan

“[A book] that altered modern thinking.”—The Times (London)

“A masterpiece.”—Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail

“Idiosyncratically brilliant.”—Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times

“The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate

“[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne. . . . We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias [and] narrative fallacy.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Hugely enjoyable—compelling . . . easy to dip into.”—Financial Times

“Engaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review

Amazing Perspective

This book can be a real eye-opener if you are able to see past your biases and keep yourself open to new ideas. Taleb has a very blunt and sarcastic style, which I personally love so I truly enjoyed this book.

Listen to it

Listen to this. Download the PDF and Listen to it. I repeat listen to it.

Brilliant

Love the story telling nature and the chippy commentary along the way. Great persona for a book to carry especially with the message it contains. Would recommend to all.

Enjoyable read

Finally got around to reading this and it was certainly worth the time to do so. I would recommend it to anyone that enjoys talking over ideas with cigars or coffee and generally finds pleasure in pondering a man's thoughts without the weight of dry presentation, as most good, but otherwise heavyweight treatises come to us.

Ultimately, Taleb conveys some rather fresh insight into uncertainty and modern statistics all the while accomplishing an enjoyable, albeit racious flow of direct conversation to the reader. something I found quite welcome. thank you Taleb

You can’t expect what you don’t know

My biggest takeaways is to learn what you don’t know in order to know more possibilities because what you currently know stops you from knowing more things.