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Cover of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, David Chandler

  • 421 pages · about 7 hours
  • First published 2007
  • 27 editions
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1 About this book

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who is a former options trader. The book focuses on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events—and the human tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events, retrospectively. Taleb calls this the Black Swan theory.

The book covers subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, as well as ways of life, and uses elements of fiction and anecdotes from the author's life to elaborate his theories. It spent 36 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

The book is part of Taleb's five-volume series, titled the Incerto, including Fooled by Randomness (2001), The Black Swan (2007–2010), The Bed of Procrustes (2010–2016), Antifragile (2012), and Skin in the Game (2018).

Summary adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Good for readers who want: philosophy and business.

  • Philosophy
  • Business
  • Prognose
  • Forecasting
  • Probability
  • Uncertainty (Information theory)

2 About Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Born 1960

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (; born 12 September 1960) is a Lebanese-American university professor, essayist, mathematical statistician, former option trader, risk analyst, and aphorist. His work concerns problems of randomness, probability, complexity, and uncertainty. Taleb wrote Incerto, a five-volume work on the nature of uncertainty published between 2001 and 2018 which includes the notable volumes The Black Swan and Antifragile.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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