Title: The Black Swan, Second Edition Pdf The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The Black Swan is a stand-alone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don't understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, Skin in the Game, and The Bed of Procrustes.
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 explains everything we know about what we don't know, 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.
Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the 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. The Black Swan is a landmark book - itself a black swan.
Includes a bonus pdf of tables and figures.
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)
"Hugely enjoyable - compelling...easy to dip into." (Financial Times)
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
A Modern Masterwork The first book that I read in the four-volume "Incerto" set by Nassim Kaleb was "Antifragile," so my reading of "The Black Swan" is out of sequence. However, I am glad that I came to it in its second edition, with footnotes addressing some of the criticisms made of it (tip: flip to the footnote as soon as you come across the symbol identifying it rather reading on to the end of the chapter where they are listed). While highly relevant to the dismal science of economics, it is far from a dismal tome. Some of the anecdotes will have you chuckling or even laughing out loud! It is a highly stimulating and entertaining book and will particularly delight those who enjoy the debunking of wrong-headed purveyors of elaborate academic theories that are not just useless but actually harmful. If this sounds like a book you might enjoy, be aware that the four-volume Incerto series is available as a set, something I found out too late to profit from the knowledge. I intend to purchase the other two volumes and recommend the set. His treatment of the devastating events known as Black Swans ought to be required reading for all who would like to avoid causing or experiencing them.Entertaining It's an entertaining book although the writing style leaves much to be desired. The main points are the contempt for any other called expert (any but the author who paints himself insufferable) in regards to the a priori information about models of the world and how one can be more open to the notion of outliers.Read the postscript in the 2nd edition and you won't need anything else A must have read. Definitely get the second edition. The "postscript essay" is the most valuable part of the whole book. You have to slog your way through endless invectives in edition one, but the postscript in edition two ties it all together in a tight presentation. Excellent work that I came to through "The Signal and the Noise".
Tags: B07KRM6L52 pdf,The Black Swan, Second Edition pdf,The Impact of the Highly Improbable pdf,,Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Joe Ochman, Random House Audio,The Black Swan, Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section:"On Robustness and Fragility": Incerto, Book 2,Random House Audio,B07KRM6L52
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