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The Black Swan: Second Edition
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  • Published: 8 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9781984841582
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

The Black Swan: Second Edition

The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility"

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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.
  • Published: 8 January 2019
  • ISBN: 9781984841582
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00
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About the author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent twenty-one years as a risk taker before becoming a researcher in philosophical, mathematical, and (mostly) practical problems with probability. Although he spends most of his time as a flâneur, meditating in cafés across the planet, he is currently Distinguished Professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. His books, part of a multivolume collection called Incerto, have been published in forty-one languages. Taleb has authored more than fifty scholarly papers as backup to Incerto, ranging from international affairs and risk management to statistical physics. Having been described as “a rare mix of courage and erudition,” he is widely recognized as the foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty. Taleb lives mostly in New York.
portrait photo of Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Also by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Skin in the Game
Antifragile
The Bed of Procrustes
The Black Swan
Fooled by Randomness
See all

Praise for The Black Swan: Second Edition

Praise for The Black Swan:

  • "The most prophetic voice of all."--GQ

  • "[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