The extreme, unknown, and improbable actually dominate our world.People come up with explanations for its occurrence, making it seem explainable and predictable.Is an outlier (it’s outside the realm of regular expectations the past does not convincingly point to its possibility).He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory.

Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the 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. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. 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 concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. 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. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan so was 9/11. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, 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. Summary: The Black Swan is a standalone 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 black swan theory book