The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable / Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pt. 1 Umberto Eco's antilibrary, or how we seek validation 1 Ch. 1 The apprenticeship of an empirical skeptic 3 Ch. 2 Yevgenia's black swan 23 Ch. 3 The speculator and the prostitute 26 Ch. 4 One thousand and one days, or how not to be a sucker 38 Ch. 5 Confirmation shmonfirmation! 51 Ch. 6 The narrative fallacy 62 Ch. 7 Living in the antechamber of hope 85 Ch. 8 Glacomo Casanova's unfailing luck : the problem of silent evidence 100 Ch. 9 The ludic fallacy, or the uncertainty of the nerd 122 Pt. 2 We just can't predict 135 Ch. 10 The scandal of prediction 137 Ch. 11 How to look for bird poop 165 Ch. 12 Epistemocracy, a dream 190 Ch. 13 Appelles the painter, or what do you do if you cannot predict? 201 Pt. 3 Those gray swans of Extremistan 213 Ch. 14 From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and back 215 Ch. 15 The bell curve, that great intellectual fraud 229 Ch. 16 The aesthetics of randomness 253 Ch. 17 Locke's madmen, or bell curves in the wrong places 274 Ch. 18 The uncertainty of the phony 286 Pt. 4 The end 293 Ch. 19 Half and half, or how to get even with the black swan 295 Epilogue : Yevgenia's white swans 299.

"A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal 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. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives." "Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don't know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the "impossible."" "For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. Now, in this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don't know. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them."--BOOK JACKET.