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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable: With A New Section: On Robustness And Fragility

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The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable: With A New Section: On Robustness And Fragility

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Random House Publishing Group | May 11, 2010 | Trade Paperback

 
A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we-especially the experts-are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.



*2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"

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Reviews

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      helpful to you?
    Mike McAloon

    Rating: 4/5

    Well done!

    Mike McAloon

    3 years ago

    Taleb does a masterful job of helping reveal the true levels of risk in many areas where we naively feel comfortable. His challenging approach to “expert opinion” and traditional modeling is refreshing. Have a glance at the FT article by Taleb “Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world” Apr 09, for a summary view on the subject.

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      helpful to you?

    Rating: 5/5

    A Black Swan of a Book

    James Burron

    4 years ago

    Black Swan brings together two genres of books: that dealing with statistics and that dealing with markets. Usually, I've found, those that delve into statistics focus on formulae and models whilst those on markets are typically (auto)biographical and deal with events (usually from the first person, such as Liar's Poker) and do not really go too deep into maths.

    Black Swan brings the two areas together beautifully. It relates people to markets and its participants and statistics (especially the wonderful Guassian bell curve) and basically says "Look, there are all these lovely theories and models that I have explained...but, take a look at the market--they don't hold."

    Black Swans are basically outliers, as they say in statistics...they are events that the 'normal' range of events and timings do not take into account. It's those once in a century storms that happen every 20 years or so. It's the 25-sigma August 2007 sub-prime meltdown (Goldman Sachs' words, not mine) that do happen (but then, GS lost $1.5-2 billion on this event and made $3-4 billion on another trade in the same market--so maybe they don't trust the probabilities that much either).

    Basically, life is random...it is not a bell curve...and Black Swan makes its case very well.

Details

From the Publisher

 
A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences. In this groundbreaking and prophetic book, Taleb shows in a playful way that Black Swan events explain almost everything about our world, and yet we-especially the experts-are blind to them. In this second edition, Taleb has added a new essay, On Robustness and Fragility, which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.



*2nd Edition, With a new essay: "On Robustness and Fragility"

About the Author

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has devoted his life to immersing himself in problems of luck, randomness, human error, probability, and the philosophy of knowledge. He managed to transform his interests into three successful careers, as a man of letters, businessman-trader-risk manager, and university professor. 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 Polytechnic Institute and Principal of Universa. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in 31 languages. He is widely recognized as the foremost thinker on probability and uncertainty. Taleb lives mostly in New York.

Trade Paperback

480 Pages, 5.15 x 7.95 x 1 in

May 11, 2010

Random House Publishing Group

English


081297381X
9780812973815

From Community

From the Critics

"The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works."-Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate
 
"Hugely enjoyable-compelling . . . easy to dip into."-Financial Times
 
"A masterpiece."-Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail 
 
"Idiosyncratically brilliant."-Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times

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