General Science
The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Publisher: Random House, 2007, 400pp, 1st ed.
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."
Table of contents
- Part One: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary, Or How We Seek Validation
- 1 The Apprenticeship of an Empirical Skeptic
- 2 Yevgenia's Black Swan
- 3 The Speculator and the Prostitute
- 4 One Thousand and One Days, or How Not to Be a Sucker
- 5 Confirmation Shmonfirmation!
- 6 The Narrative Fallacy
- 7 Living in the Antechamber of Hope
- 8 Giacomo Casanova's Unfailing Luck: The Problem of Silent Evidence
- 9 The Ludic Fallacy, or The Uncertainty of the Nerd
- Part Two: We Just Can't Predict
- From Yogi Berra to Henri Poincaré
- 10 The Scandal of Prediction
- 11 How to Look for Bird Poop
- 12 Epistemocracy, a Dream
- 13 Appelles the Painter, or What Do You Do if You Cannot Predict?
- Part Three: Those Gray Swans Of Extremistan
- 14 From Mediocristan to Extremistan, and Back
- 15 The Bell Curve, That Great Intellectual Fraud
- 16 The Aesthetics of Randomness
- 17 Locke's Madmen, or Bell Curves in the Wrong Places
- 18 The Uncertainty of the Phony
- Part Four: The End
- 19 Half and Half, or How to Get Even with the Black Swan
- Epilogue: Yevgenia's White Swans