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.
