The Black Swan : : the Impact of the Highly Improbable

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	003.54 Ta	4-week checkout	Due 05-23-2024

Originally published in hardcover and in slightly different form by Random House in 2007.
Prologue -- Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation. The apprenticeship of an empirical skeptic ; Yevgenia's black swan ; The speculator and the prostitute ; One thousand and one days, or how not to be a sucker ; Confirmation shmonfirmation! ; The narrative fallacy ; Living in the antechamber of hope ; Giacomo Casanova's unfailing luck : the problem of silent evidence ; The Ludic fallacy, or the uncertainty of the nerd -- We just can't predict. The scandal of prediction ; How to look for bird poop ; Epistemocracy, a dream ; Appelles the Painter, or what do you do if you cannot predict? -- Those gray swans of Extremistan. From Mediocristan to Extremistan and back ; The bell curve, that great intellectual fraud ; The aesthetics of randomness ; Locke's madmen, or bell curves in the wrong places ; The uncertainty of the phony -- The end. Half and half, or how to get even with the black swan -- Epilogue : Yevgenia's white swans -- Postscript essay: on robustness an fragility, deeper philosophical and empirical reflections. Learning from mother nature, the oldest and the wisest ; Why I do all this walking, or how systems become fragile ; Margaritas ante porcos ; Asperger and the ontological black swan ; (Perhaps) the most useful problem in the history of modern philosophy ; Fourth quadrant, the solution to that most useful of problems ; What to do with the fourth quadrant ; Ten principles for a black-swan-robust society ; Amor fati: how to become indestructible.
Examines the role of the unexpected, discussing why improbable events are not anticipated or understood properly, and how humans rationalize the black swan phenomenon to make it appear less random.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

Library Journal Review
CHOICE Review
Booklist Review
Summary / Annotation
Table of Contents
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Insightful and Unexpectedly Entertaining submitted by sVfGI7Glt2pz7GZgVB90 on July 13, 2020, 7:43am
While it has no prophetic merit – black swans are by definition “unknown unknowns” – the book’s disapproval of the conventional Gaussian models used by all of us strikes a chord.

Taleb’s take on human nature feels spot on. I also appreciated his investigation on the nature of innovation which he puts down to to tinkering over to grand theorizing.

In spite of the arguably serious nature of the book, the book is made highly enjoyable by Taleb’s rants against the practitioners of the social sciences, particularly financial economists, and against Nobel Prize winners by and large.