Description / general overview :

Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world. Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own personal lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle 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. And why do we always ignore the phenomenon of Black Swans until after they occur? As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reveals, we are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the 'impossible'. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know, and shows us how to face the world.

CONTENTS:

Chapter 1:The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic

Chapter 2:Yevgenia's Black Swan

Chapter 3:The Speculator and the Prostitute

Chapter 4:One Thousand and One Days,or How Not to Be a Sucker

Chapter 5:Confirmation Shmonfirmation

Chapter 6:The Narrative Fallacy

Chapter 7:Living in the Antechamber of Hope

Chapter 8:Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck

Chapter 9:The Ludic Fallacy

Chapter10:The Scandal of Prediction

Chapter 11:How to look at Bird Poop

Chapter 12:Epistemocracy,a Dream

Chapter 13:Appelles the Painter

Chapter 14:From Mediocristan to Extremistan,and Back

Chapter 15:The Bell Curve,That Great Intellectual Fraud

Chapter 16:The Aesthetics of Randomness

Chapter 17:Locke's Madmen,or Bell Curves in the wrong Places

Chapter 18:The Uncertainty of the Phony

Chapter 19:Half and Half,or How to get Even with the Black Swan