(P/B) THE BLACK SWAN

Παρουσίαση

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. (From the publisher)

Περιεχόμενα

Prologue
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 unfalling luck: the problem of silent evidence
9. The ludic fallacy, or the uncertainty of the nerd
PART TWO: WE JUST CAN'T PREDICT
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
GLOSSARY
POSTSCRIPT ESSAY: ON ROBUSTNESS AND FRAGILITY, DEEPER PHILOSOPHICAL AND EMPIRICAL REFLECTIONS
I. Learning from mother nature, the oldest and the wisest
II. Why I do all this walking, or how systems become fragile
III. Margaritas ante porcos
IV. Asperger and the ontological black swan
V. (Perhaps) the most useful problem in the history of modern philosophy
VI. The fourth quadrant, the solution to that most useful of problems
VII. What to do with the fourth quadrant
VIII. The ten principles for a black-swan-robust society
IX. Amor fati: how to become indestructible
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE FIRST EDITION
INDEX