What have the invention of the wheel, Pompeii, the Wall Street Crash, Harry Potter and the internet got in common? Why are all forecasters con-artists? What can Catherine the Great's lovers tell us about probability? And, why should you never run for a train or read a newspaper? This book is all about Black Swans: the random events that underlie our lives, from bestsellers to world disasters. Their impact is huge; they're impossible to predict; yet after they happen we always try to rationalize them. A rallying cry to ignore the 'experts', The Black Swan shows us how to stop trying to predict everything - and take advantage of uncertainty.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb spends most of his time as a flaneur, meditating in cafes across the planet. A former trader, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University. His books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan have been published in thirty-one languages.
纳西姆·尼古拉斯·塔勒布,当前最令人敬畏的风险管理理论学者。沃顿商学院企管硕士,巴黎大学博士,目前任纽约大学理工学院杰出教授。曾在纽约和伦敦交易多种衍生性金融商品,也曾在芝加哥当过营业厅的独立交易员。2001年2月正式成为衍生性金融商品交易战略名人堂的一员。他在“9·11”之前大量买入行权价格很低,看似毫无价值的认沽权证,用一种独特的方式做空美国股市,直到恐怖分子劫持飞机撞向纽约世贸大楼,由此获利丰厚,一举成名。此次美国次贷危机爆发之前,他又先知先觉重仓做空,从中获利几百万美元。他的上一本畅销书《黑天鹅的世界》(Fooled by Randomness)以30种语言出版。
【目录】
Prologue
PART ONE UMBERTO ECO'S ANTILIBRARY,OF 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 Shmonfirmation!
Chapter 6 The Narrative Fallacy
Chapter 7 Living 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,of What Do You Do if you Cannot Predict?
PART THREE THOSE GRAY SWANS OF EXTREMISTAN
Chapter 14 From Mediocristan,and Back
Chapter 15 The Bell Curve That Great Intellectual Fraud
Chapter 16 The Aesthetics of Randomness
Chapter 17 Locke's Mandmen,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
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