• Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In this irreverent, yet scholarly work, a financial trader and philosopher contends that a deeper understanding of world events comes from paying close attention to impactful statistical improbabilities he refers to as "black swans," by studying outliers rather than norms. The essay blends anecdotes and fables with a survey of historical events, social sciences, philosophy, and statistics and illustrates the need for a world view that goes well beyond the often misplaced certainty found in the bell curve. Graphs and other visual aids throughout; includes a brief glossary and an extensive footnote section.

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. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them.

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.

"[A] provocative macro-trend tome...."

"Taleb's critique of our current pretensions to knowledge, and of our unwarranted faith in our understanding of things like risk and change, is both rigorous and convincing. And THE BLACK SWAN is a terrifically engaging book, sophisticated without being inaccessible."

"Writing in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne....Mr. Taleb presents a range of answers...but it's clear that he remains slightly vexed by the world he describes so vividly. Then again, beatific serenity may not be the goal here.... As Mr. Taleb warns, certitude is likely to be found only in a fool's (bell-curve) paradise, where we choose the comfort of the 'precisely wrong' over the challenge of the 'broadly correct.' Beneath Mr. Taleb's blustery rhetoric lives a surprisingly humble soul who has chosen to follow a demanding and somewhat lonely path. I wonder how many of us will have the courage to join him."