"[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."

--DAVID A. SHAYWITZ, The Wall Street Journal

"An eye-opening book, one that teases our intelligence... [Taleb] is after big game, and he bags it."

--ROGER LOWENSTEIN, Portfolig

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 the event 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 personal lives. But because humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities, we are unable to truly estimate opportunities and are 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. He offers surprisingly simple tricks for dealing with black swans and benefiting from them. Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan is a landmark book that will change the way you look at the world.

Prologue

PART ONE: UMBERTO ECO’S ANTILIBRARY, OR HOW WE SEEK VALIDATION

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 Shmonfirmationl

Chapter 6: The Narrative Fallacy

Chapter 7: Llving In the Antechamber of Hope

Chapter 8: Giacomo Casanova’s Unfailing Luck:The Problem of Silent Evidence

Chapter 9: The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd

PART TWO: WE JUST CAN’T PREDICT

Chapter 10: The Scandal of Prediction

Chapter 11 : How to Look for Bird Poop

Chapter 12: Epistemocracy, a Dream

Chapter 13: Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?

PART THREE: THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN

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

PART FOUR: THE END

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

Epilogue: Yevgenia’s White Swans

Acknowledgments

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index