The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility". Winner of the Wirtschaftsbuchpreis Financial Times Deutschland getAbstract 2007

Examines the role of the unexpected--the Black Swan--in both life and human history, explaining how the phenomenon and its applications affect every aspect of the world in which we live, why humans are unable to anticipate a Black Swan, and how we rationalize the phenomenon to make it appear less random.

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 kn ow. 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.

Rezension:

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

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