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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.
- Sales Rank: #2839 in Books
- Brand: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Published on: 2010-05-11
- Released on: 2010-05-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.98" h x 1.09" w x 5.15" l, .73 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 444 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
Bestselling author Nassim Nicholas Taleb continues his exploration of randomness in his fascinating new book, The Black Swan, in which he examines the influence of highly improbable and unpredictable events that have massive impact. Engaging and enlightening, The Black Swan is a book that may change the way you think about the world, a book that Chris Anderson calls, "a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature." See Anderson's entire guest review below.
Guest Reviewer: Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson is editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
Four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon warned that our minds are wired to deceive us. "Beware the fallacies into which undisciplined thinkers most easily fall--they are the real distorting prisms of human nature." Chief among them: "Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature." Now consider the typical stock market report: "Today investors bid shares down out of concern over Iranian oil production." Sigh. We're still doing it.
Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don't--and, most importantly, can't--know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb first made this argument in Fooled by Randomness, an engaging look at the history and reasons for our predilection for self-deception when it comes to statistics. Now, in The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable, he focuses on that most dismal of sciences, predicting the future. Forecasting is not just at the heart of Wall Street, but it’s something each of us does every time we make an insurance payment or strap on a seat belt.
The problem, Nassim explains, is that we place too much weight on the odds that past events will repeat (diligently trying to follow the path of the "millionaire next door," when unrepeatable chance is a better explanation). Instead, the really important events are rare and unpredictable. He calls them Black Swans, which is a reference to a 17th century philosophical thought experiment. In Europe all anyone had ever seen were white swans; indeed, "all swans are white" had long been used as the standard example of a scientific truth. So what was the chance of seeing a black one? Impossible to calculate, or at least they were until 1697, when explorers found Cygnus atratus in Australia.
Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. September 11th is one such example, and stock market crashes are another. Or, as he puts it, "History does not crawl, it jumps." Our assumptions grow out of the bell-curve predictability of what he calls "Mediocristan," while our world is really shaped by the wild powerlaw swings of "Extremistan."
In full disclosure, I'm a long admirer of Taleb's work and a few of my comments on drafts found their way into the book. I, too, look at the world through the powerlaw lens, and I too find that it reveals how many of our assumptions are wrong. But Taleb takes this to a new level with a delightful romp through history, economics, and the frailties of human nature. --Chris Anderson
From Booklist
In business and government, major money is spent on prediction. Uselessly, according to Taleb, who administers a severe thrashing to MBA- and Nobel Prize-credentialed experts who make their living from economic forecasting. A financial trader and current rebel with a cause, Taleb is mathematically oriented and alludes to statistical concepts that underlie models of prediction, while his expressive energy is expended on roller-coaster passages, bordering on gleeful diatribes, on why experts are wrong. They neglect Taleb's metaphor of "the black swan," whose discovery invalidated the theory that all swans are white. Taleb rides this manifestation of the unpredicted event into a range of phenomena, such as why a book becomes a best-seller or how an entrepreneur becomes a billionaire, taking pit stops with philosophers who have addressed the meaning of the unexpected and confounding. Taleb projects a strong presence here that will tempt outside-the-box thinkers into giving him a look. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
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
Most helpful customer reviews
1536 of 1672 people found the following review helpful.
Lost in Extremistan with nothing but a Bell Curve
By Review Guy
If, as Socrates would have it, the only true knowledge is knowledge of one's own ignorance, then Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the world's greatest living teacher. In The Black Swan, Taleb's second book for laypeople, he gives a full treatment to concepts briefly explored in his first book "Fooled by Randomness." The Black Swan is basically a sequel to that book, but much more focused, detailed and scholarly. This is a book of serious philosophy that reads like a stand-up comedy routine. (Think Larry David...)
The Black Swan is probably the strongest statement of enlightened empiricism since Ernst Mach refused to acknowledge the existence of the atom. Of course, in theory, everyone today is supposed to be an empiricist - all right-thinking intellectuals claim to base their views solely on positive scientific observation. But very few sincerely confront the implications of rigorous empiricism. Specifically, few confront "the problem of induction," illustrated here by the story of the black swan.
Briefly: observing an event once does not predict it will occur again in the future. This remains true regardless of the number of observations one adds to the pile. Or, as Taleb, recapitulating David Hume, has it: the observation of even a million white swans does not justify the statement "all swans are white." There is no way to know that somewhere out there a black swan is not hiding, disproving the rule and nullifying our "knowledge" of swans. The problem of induction tells us that we cannot really learn from our experiences. It makes knowledge very problematic, if not impossible. And yet, humans do behave -almost without exception- as though they believe that experience teaches us lessons. This is forgivable; there is no better path to knowledge. But before proceeding, one must account for the limits that the problem of induction places on our claims to knowledge. And humans seem, at every turn, to lack this critical self-awareness.
In one of the many humorous anecdotes that seem to comprise this entire book, Taleb recounts how he learned his extreme skepticism from his first boss, a French gentleman trader who insisted that he should not worry about the fluctuating values of economic indicators. (Indeed, Taleb proudly declares that, to this day, he remains blissfully ignorant of supposedly crucial "indicators" like housing starts and consumer spending. This is a shocking statement from a guy whose day job is managing a hedge fund.) Even if these "common knowledge" indicators are predictive of anything (dubious - see above), they are useless to you because everyone else is already accounting for them. They are "white swans," or common sense. Regardless of their magnitude, white swans are basically irrelevant to the trader - they have already been impounded into the market. In this environment, one can only profitably concern oneself with those bets which others are systematically ignoring - bets on those highly unlikely, but highly consequential events that utterly defy the conventional wisdom. What Taleb ought to worry about, the Frenchman warned, was not the prospect of a quarter-percent rise in interest rates, but a plane hitting the World Trade Center!
Yep, the precise facts of 9-11 were actually presaged by this French gentlemen, as a rogue wave that just might be lurking over the horizon. And, to the contemporary American mind, this is THE quintessential Black Swan. Of course, the Frenchman's insight was just a coincidence - the thing with Black Swans is that they cannot be foreseen.
Taleb explains that conventional social scientists use induction to collect data, which is then plotted on the good old Gaussian bellcurve. With characteristic silliness, Taleb dubs the land of the bellcurve "Mediocristan" - and informs us that it is the natural habitat of the white swan. He contrasts Mediocristan with "Extremistan" - where chaos reigns, the wholly unexpected happens, power laws and fractal geometry apply and the bellcurve does not. Taleb's fictional/metaphorical 'stans' share something with the 'stans' of the real world: very ill-defined borders. Indeed, one can never tell whether one is in the relatively safe territory of Mediocristan or if one has wandered into the lawless tribal regions of Extremistan. The bellcurve can only help you in Mediocristan, but you have no way of knowing whether you have strayed into Extremistan - beyond the bellcurve's jurisdiction. This means that bellcurves are of no reliable use, anywhere. The full implications of this take a while to sink in, and are sure to cause huge controversy. In July, Taleb will debate Charles Murray (author of -what else?- the Bell Curve). I'll let you know who wins.
Taleb frames his whole argument much more entertainingly than I could here, and he bolsters it with an astonishing command of both cutting-edge social science and the entire history of philosophy. This is an astonishing work of serious philosophy, and it reads like pulp fiction. Readers who enjoyed FBR will find here the same dry wit, the same literary erudition, and deep sense of the absurd that made that book so much fun. But this is better, by an order of magnitude - easily the best book I have read in 5 years. I smell a timely pop-science bestseller here to rival Gladwell or Surowiecki, but this is also a classic that will be read for decades to come.
1064 of 1169 people found the following review helpful.
Many important ideas, many flaws that detract from the message
By Amazon Customer
This is an entertaining and enlightening book, and fairly easy to read. It has an important message regarding how the world works; that the world is governed not by the predictable and the average, but by the random, the unknownable, the unpredictable -- big events or discoveries or unusual people that have big consequences. Change comes not uniformly but in unpredictable spurts. These are the Black Swans of the title: completedly unexpected and rare events or novel ideas or technologies that have a huge impact on the world. Indeed, Taleb argues that history itself is primarly driven by these Black Swans.
It is convincing argument, entertainingly presented with plenty of sarcasm, and indeed, anger, by Taleb. For example he rails against the academic community, economists (including specific names), and Nobel Prize committee. Considerable numbers of his arguments "ring true" to me, that is my experience in life confirms that they are more accurate than the traditional approach. Like any important work, 90% of what is in the book is not original; that does not make it less important. Taleb's contribution is in integrating the material together, and showing how these different ideas are tied to the Black Swan.
The themes include: winner-take-all phenonomen, numerous effects of randomness on the world, the invalidity of the Gaussian Bell Curve to most things in world, concepts of scalablity, numerous instabilities in the world, especially the modern world where information travels so quickly, the fallacies about people's inability to predict the future. The importance of these ideas, Taleb's ability to weave them together into a single theory, and the ability of this theory to change the way you look at the world, means the book easily deserves my highest recommendation.
However, the book does have many flaws, unfortunately -- unfortunate because I believe they will take away from the credibility of the message, which is in important one. The are numerous minor flaws such as, for example, the inexplicable invention of a fictional author (disclosed a few pages later), when certainly there must have been some real example that would have worked better. Another example is repeated jabs about the French; these may be amusing but I just don't think they have a place in work like this. There are also diatribes against specific people, including famous economists, which, though amusing, and possibly justified, demonstrate a high level of anger by author and take away from his credibility. Often he also overreaches, for example in saying the usual combination of anti-abortion and pro-death penalty or the opposite combined views of pro-abortion and anti-death penatly cannot be explained logically, when in fact widely known theories such as George Lakoff's (in Moral Politics) have explained hows these groups of views are entirely consistent.
Another flaw is that Taleb seems to go a little toward the extreme of saying that we can predict almost nothing about the future, and though he does not say so explicitly, this seems to imply we have no moral responsibility to the future. This, combined with Taleb's advice to the reader about their behavior based on the "Black Swan" view of world just rubbed me the wrong way, for several reasons. One is that Taleb personally has very little in common with most people; never having as far as I know had a regular career (essentially what he calls non-scalable, e.g. dentist, engineer, baker) he nevertheless recommends that people choose these kinds of careers rather than a scalable career (e.g. financial trader, author, actor which are subject to a few lucky successful people and a lot of failures). This advise is odd first because Taleb is in a non-scalable profession (derivatives trader, then hedge fund manager) -- indeed it appears he is quite wealthy. Even more odd because he says all these types of non-scalable types of work are boring and evens makes sarcastic comments (the book is extremely sarcasm heavy) for example about dentists being able to do well by diligently drilling teeth for 30 years. The second things that bothered me is that Taleb seems be somewhat amoral to me; in this type of book where plenty of his own emotions come through, plenty of his personality, he has plenty of criticism of others for their wrong models and wrong view of the world, and how this has hurt the world, but there remains a lack of moral responsibility to his advice.
Perhaps the best comparison I could make are to other important works that do not suffer from these flaws, for example the Age of Fallibility by George Soros and Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller (1st and 2nd editions). But probably Black Swan will sell better than either of these because of it's "edginess," i.e. aggresiveness; I personally have a distaste for this approach.
Despite my criticisms, the main ideas of the book as so important as to merit reading and indeed great consideration.
101 of 109 people found the following review helpful.
Fresh Skepticism in a New Age
By Dan Wallace
Taleb's central premise is that we delude ourselves with popular stories, false knowledge, myths, overvalued facts, and the appearance of science. He calls this the narrative fallacy, and counsels, "The way to avoid the ills of the narrative fallacy is to favor experimentation over storytelling, experience over history, and clinical knowledge over theories." Good advice.
Given this push for what David Brooks calls "epistemological modesty," you may expect a humble book, -- and if so, you would be disappointed. Taleb lambasts the hubris of Wall Street, yet he is a product of this culture; and the book shows it. His belief in uncertainty combined with his sharp views is broadly ironic. Some reviewers call it arrogant.
I put the bravado aside, and even found it entertaining at times, for Taleb's case is well put, and the book is brisling with thoughtful aphorisms and vivid stories. Here are a few of my favorite lines:
- Luck is more important than skill.
- Risk is the most when you feel the safest.
- Look for evidence that proves your ideas wrong.
- There are no experts of things that move.
- Too much information becomes toxic.
- The wise plead ignorance to world events.
- We cannot compare current reality with an alternative.
- Our highest currency is respect.
- "Randomness" is unknowledge.
- Be prepared for multiple contingencies.
- "I don't know," is a sign of intelligence.
- We are swayed by the sensational.
- Seize every opportunity, for they are rare.
- Go to parties -- chitchat leads to breakthroughs.
These are thoughtful nuggets to consider. And despite the pride that occasionally dances on the pages, Taleb is a good writer and an even better philosopher. The book is part memoir, part postmodern treatise on skepticism, part rant. It is an idiosyncratic, fresh and fascinating narrative.
This book is also a full frontal assault on the Wall Street establishment that uses statistics, bell curves and Black-Scholes theory to sell portfolio allocation. For investors, Taleb advocates a "barbell strategy" where you put 85-90% of your money in cash or equivalents, and the remainder in extremely risky investments that are scalable. He goes on at some length to talk about the dynamics of scalable investments and scalable careers such as sales, venture capital, and entrepreneurial ventures. In the end, he recommends against entering scalable professions due to the many risks involved. More irony.
For those who do hit it big and make what Taleb calls FU money, he recommends a dedication to scholarship, for he sees the pursuit of money and material goods as a nightmare. And he warns that scalable success may not come for a long time, or it may never come, and sojourners in scalable professions will have to endure the cruelty of critics. This line of thinking feels balanced and wise.
I was fascinated when I read this book in the winter of 2008, partly because Taleb had correctly forecast a major stock market crash, and partly because I had recent experience working as a marketing consultant for a large Wall Street investment firm (which no longer exists). That consulting experience and this book have left an imprint on my mind.
I have not studied Edmond Burke or David Hume, so currently, Nassim Nicholas Taleb my favorite skeptic, and The Black Swan is one of my favorite books.
When Taleb was Tweeting, he praised "Straw Dogs" by the contemporary British philosopher, David Gray. Gray's book takes skepticism to new and brilliant heights, and in my option it flies over the top. Perhaps some day I will review Straw Dogs as well, but for now I'll stick with Black Swans.
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
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