The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable eBook (PDF)

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable is a New York Times best-seller book on philosophy/sociology written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese American epidemiologist. It was first published in 2007 and was republished as expanded second edition in 2010. Covering subjects relating to knowledge, aesthetics, and ways of life, the book offers an extended discussion on the black swan theory: the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outlives) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively.

In this book, Taleb describes a black swan as an event that is highly improbable based on these three principal characteristics: it is unpredictable, it creates a massive impact, and it leads us, after the fact, to devise an explanation to make it appear less random and more predictable than it actually is. According to Taleb, black swans lie behind almost everything in our world history, from tide of events in political, economic, and religious worlds, to events in each person’s life. Included as the examples of black swans are the beyond belief success of Google and the tragic 9/11 attack.



The book brings elegant and surprising discussion and conveys the universality of black swan theory application in human life. In a sharp and engaging way, Taleb tells unusual stories and various subjects (business, cognitive science, probability) that in the end might change they way readers view the world they currently live in.

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